Near the end of On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz says this about the walks she’s taken over the course of writing the book, and how they’ve changed her: “I have become, I fear, a difficult walking companion, liable to slow down and point at things. I can turn this off, but I love to have it on: a sense of wonder that I, and we all, have a predisposition to but have forgotten to enjoy” (264-265). Which is great, but is maybe what also makes me not this book’s ideal audience: I was already big on noticing-while-walking, already likely to point at things (the honeysuckle in a front garden, the way the ivy on a building’s side is being rippled by the wind, graffiti, signs with old telephone exchanges, light). Which isn’t to say I pay vivid attention to my surroundings all the time, and which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy this book: just that maybe it’d be more interesting for people who aren’t already quite as into city-walking-while-looking as I am.
Horowitz structures the book around the “eleven walks” of the subtitle, though there are really more walks than that: she starts and ends with a solitary walk, and one of the chapters actually has two experts, and, I’m pretty sure, two walks. But anyhow: she sets out to walk familiar city streets with an eye to things she either doesn’t know about or doesn’t normally attend to: with the help of experts, she intends to learn about her surroundings, but also to learn to move through her surroundings differently, to be awake to things she previously would have missed: she and her experts will be, as she puts it, “investigators of the ordinary” (3). The experts are varied, and include her nineteen-month-old son and the family dog, as well as a geologist, a typographer, an artist (Maira Kalman! Who is awesome!), a field naturalist (specialty: insects), an animal behavior researcher (specialty: urban wildlife), the president of the Project for Public Spaces, a doctor, a physical therapist, a blind person, and a sound designer/sound engineer.
In the course of the walks, Horowitz learns about some stuff I already knew about (Manhattan schist, the paths of glaciers and the “erratics” left behind) but also stuff I didn’t know (like: I knew about limestone’s aquatic origins, but didn’t realize you can spot fossil crinoids or traces of sea worms in it; I had no idea about the galls inside which insect larvae live). She also writes about attention and cognition: how our brains filter and create the images and sensations we have of the world around us, how our expectations affect what we notice or don’t. This sometimes makes for a narrative that doesn’t quite flow: in most chapters, Horowitz is writing about the experience of a specific walk through a specific place and what she saw and learned, but also about these overarching issues of how we process information, and it sometimes feels like too much combined. I think the chapters featuring walks with her son and her dog were my favorites, and I think it’s partly because they’re more focused on recounting the actual walk: Horowitz learns things on these walks, and writes about what she learns, but her experts in these chapters aren’t actually teaching her facts and figures, and it makes for better writing, I think. I liked this, in the chapter about walking with her son:
A walk is exploring surfaces and textures with finger, toe, and—yuck—tongue; standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying out different forms of locomotion (among them running, marching, high-kicking, galloping, scooting, projectile falling, spinning, and noisy shuffling). It is archeology: exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground. It is stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees; locating the source of the bird’s song; pointing. (21)
And this, in the chapter about walking with the family dog:
One dog, an energetic brown-and-white houndy type, galloping toward us against the restraint of the owner he was pulling along, seemed to smell particularly interesting to Finn—and Finn to him. They wagged mightily at each other, tails high in the air, the wags taut and vigorous, then set to an intensive sniff dance. I call it a dance because they moved together, like long-term dance partners, doing some behaviors at once, and others in response to each other: first, mutual sniffing of the low bellies; then back upright, faces close; then a circle step, caused by each trying to get his nose right at the base of the other’s tail. (252-253)
So good, right? The whole dog chapter, actually, made me very excited about reading Horowitz’s other book, Inside of a Dog: dogs are one of her areas of expertise, and clearly she writes about them well.
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