Because of sensory capabilities, our species, and our own inability to attend to things (the latter of which we can at least correct for), so much of the world passes right by our observation and conceptual reality. In some sense (heh), it’s like sensory pollution that we stop noticing and live with. On a basic level, we need to live like this so as to navigate the world: imagine if we did take in every possible sensory sensation, including down to the coursing of our own blood and beating of our heart, and other observable facts of the world, each time we stepped outside. It would be maddening and living would be impossible. As the author I’m about to talk about said, the ignorance of external stimuli is called concentration. Nonetheless, there is something to be said for being more attuned, or attentive, to the world we live in, from sound to smell to history to the fellow beings we live with, particularly non-human. Alexandra Horowitz’s 2013 book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, tries to get a sense of the senses and much more with various experts who see the world differently than she does and many of us do. To quote Marcel Proust as Horowitz does, “The only true voyage … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is.” How poignant. Anything that gets someone outside of their own tunnel vision of the world the better. Horowitz also uses these experts and their subjects as launching points to discuss human and other animal behavior, biology, evolution, and the science behind the senses to better understand what is literally going on during her walks.
Horowitz lives in New York City, an ample venue for walking and observation. Her first walk is with her toddler son, which is a great vessel, if you will, to begin with, not only owing to the metaphor of infancy, but because infants, toddlers, adolescents, all see the world before they have fully learned to “ignore external stimuli” or even to properly “name” what they are seeing and otherwise sensing. Even in naming — using language — there is a certain detachment from the purity of the observation.
Sidney Horenstein, a geologist, is her next walk. A geologist in the urban landscape of New York City has a literal field day with all the varying and varying-sourced stone or rock that constitutes the city and the history it tells therein. I also thought this chapter was illuminating in the sense of, we think of everything man-made as somehow artificial, but everything man-made is of nature, like stones and rocks! We just modify nature to our ends.
Walk anywhere — it doesn’t have to be New York City — and you are likely to encounter lettering of some kind, whether it’s on a license plate, a street sign, a billboard, or over a storefront. Humans have been advertising to each other for thousands of years (which is why bemoaning it as a recent fixture, or problem, is rather silly), with all manner of lettering styles. Horowitz’s third walk is with Paul Shaw, a professional letterhead, as it were. He’s the kind of person that can tell the difference on sight between Helvetica and Adobe Garamond, and if the spacing between lettering is off. For something that is going to be in people’s faces all the time, and something attempting to compel them inside your establishment, it is interesting to really look at the lettering used for storefronts, but of course, to Horowitz’s point, we tend to stop seeing if we see them all the time paradoxically.
An illustrator most certainly would see New York City differently, delighting in a couch set out for the trash, for example, because of the story it tells. Mira Kalman is the next person to walk with Horowitz, and yes, she’s an illustrator. “She collects the ordinary, the things that you trip over but have forgotten to look at.” I love delighting in the ordinary, remembering how extraordinary everything around us actually is. The other compelling thing about the way in which Kalman walked that Horowitz hadn’t before is Kalman was willing to walk into public buildings out of curiosity and to explore, buildings Horowitz had always passed but never been inside. We’re creatures of habit and we tend to stick to the routine rather than any sort of deviation like that. She was more sociable than Horowitz is, too, talking to all manner of passerby. Wherever one walks outside it is a public affair, and yet, we obviously tend to maintain some bubble of privacy around our bodies. Those “concentric circles of personal spaces” varies depending on the person and the culture. The most intriguing aspect of this to me is the different way one may use an inside vs. outside voice. For the record, even outside, I tend to utilize the inside voice.
One cannot exist anywhere outside with the presence of bugs. As a kid, I enjoyed flipping rocks over to find rolly pollies (which is also just fun to say). Charley Eiseman, the bug guy, would also love such an exercise. Within a few moments of walking with Horowitz, he could spend hours just unpacking the nearest parking lots for its bugs. There is an intriguing evolutionary yin-yang of plant life versus insect life and the story it tells about a city. Humans sometimes even interject themselves into this fight when so-called “invasive species” come around disrupting everything.
Cities are notoriously known for their vermin, the rats and raccoons who permeate the bowels of the city. If you’re John Hadidian, you find them an object of study rather than a menace. He’s a Senior Scientist at the Wildlife division of the Humane Society, and he’s been studying the urban raccoon for more than 25 years. Similar to the yin-yang of plant life and insects (and throw birds in the mix, too), there is a yin-yang of urban wildlife and humans. Urban wildlife, like rats, racoons, squirrels, etc., had to learn to adapt to our presence, which admittedly, isn’t too difficult. Again, we’re rather predictable creatures, hence the animals coming out at night predominantly as opposed to in the daytime when all the hustle and bustle is happening.
Behavioral science is always going to interest me, and city life, and its very design, provides ample opportunity to understand human behavior, particularly that of the pedestrian. There are scientists, like Fred Kent who Horowitz walked with, who have spent years studying how people walk, queue at the bus station, or literally watched a trash can for a day to see what happens. As a fast walker, I’ve always been bothered by the slow walker, the middle-of-the-sidewalk stopper, the group of people who don’t try to make room for you on the sidewalk, the cell phone walker, and so on, but Kent thinks slowing down is a positive feature (he probably still wouldn’t like the other pedestrian behaviors, though). “It’s social; it’s kind of getting a sense of something. That’s what a city is.” And I had literally just done that very thing in Chicago last week, so, I get it! Kent argues the urban experience should be dense with buildings and people, a design that encourages loitering (it’s also perplexing that loitering became a “crime”). One of my favorite organizing principles is spontaneous order. Without anyone organizing it as such, for the most part, humans walk through cities, loiters notwithstanding, abiding by the norms of the sidewalk: avoid bumping others (the personal space again!), follow whoever is in front of you (those queuing up for theme parks rides are bad at this, as I bemoaned last week!), and keep up with those next to you (have you ever tried talking to someone behind you or in front of you? It’s weird!). Humans obviously aren’t the only animals who behave in this orderly “herd” way, ants, fish, and birds are other examples. And it should be said, this spontaneous order, this abiding by sidewalk rules, is not consciously done for the most part. We just do it while being in our headspace otherwise or gazing at the city around us.
Some people are extraordinarily good at looking, so good at looking that I would be self-conscious to show them my gait, or the way in which I walk. Not that it is a perfect science by any means, but people like Dr. Bennett Lorber, who made such observations of other people’s gaits and medical history therein while walking with Horowitz, have made a life of doing so. A simple exercise to show how important looking is to his profession, Dr. Lorber would ask his medical students what they saw upon walking into a room with a patient. Inevitability, they all noted the IV. But they were unable to go into specifics, much less note any other observations. He then would tell them he noticed the Bible on her nightstand and photographs of her family around her. In other words, using observation to create a picture of this patient as a real human being rather than someone with an IV. I found this chapter so insightful and fun, obviously echoing the Holmesian of it all. (It also made me think, damn, our bodies are poorly designed and it’s inevitable my knees and/or back is going to deteriorate over time.)
What if you had to navigate the city, the walk with Horowitz, without eyesight? What would you see then? What would she see? Horowitz walked with Arlene Gordon, who became blind later in life, and navigates the city with her walking stick. She uses the stick and its echolocation of sorts to provide a map in her head of the city and thus, how to navigate it, as well as leaning more into her other senses. This provides Horowitz an opportunity to talk about the extraordinariness of bats, for example, and how they navigate the world with echolocation quite literally on the fly. We rely so much upon our eyes for observations when we walk while we are also beset by smells, noises, and touches.
The difference between what we deem noise, a sound, and music depends on the beholder, although perhaps, jokes aside, everyone would recognize music as music, even if it’s not to their liking. For someone like Scott Lehrer, a sound designer for theater and a sound engineer, an idling bus engine, if tweaked, could be an interesting sound as opposed to just another of many noises within a city environment (he said if you were listening to it for itself, it could be soothing). There are all kinds of sounds within a city, and something I didn’t give much thought to is the way in which the material of the city (the stones and rocks!), weather conditions, and our placement within the city impacts how we hear sound. Which makes sense as sound are vibrations of air moving through space. The most fascinating thing about sound (and sight) is how our brain fills in the gaps of what we expect to hear and see versus what we are actually hearing and seeing. The brain is a marvel.
For someone whose previous book was, Inside of a Dog, it makes sense that Horowitz would end her book, and her walks, with a dog. She walked with her dog Finn. Finn is really a jumping off point for talking about smell and how smell is overlooked in our attending to being out and about in the world. Dogs, of course, have an extraordinarily developed and heightened sense of smell, especially compared to humans. I learned from this book what I’ve always wondered: Why do dogs sneeze and why do dogs lick their noses? They sneeze to clear out there noses to prepare for the next buffet of smelling, and they lick their noses to “catch” the odors, as it were! Imagine what it would be like walking through New York City as a dog, the smells you would smell! And even if you did the same block each day, there’s bound to be new smells as the old smells fade away and are replaced by new ones. Forget Horenstein’s rocks, what about the history the layers of urine can tell us about a city block?! But seriously, smells bring with it a bounty of loveliness: nostalgia for childhood, flavors for food, and other delights, like for me, the smell of an old (or new!) book.
Through the course of reading Horowitz’s book, which incidentally involved a lot of walking throughout Orlando’s theme parks and Chicago, I did make a conscious effort to be more attentive.
Here is what I was more attentive to:
- I flew to Orlando. How many times have you been on a plane and truly listened to the airplane safety instructions from the flight attendants? If you fly a lot, you likely zone those instructions out. In fact, you probably arrived on the plane with headphones already blocking external noise out. But if a calamity should happen, it seems like a good idea to be familiar with what to do!
- After spending a day at Epic Universe, I returned to the shuttle shelter to await my shuttle back to the hotel. I sat on the concrete with a Starbucks drink and then noticed an ant coming my way. I used my finger to play with him, not that he would know, by blocking his path or letting him crawl up my finger. Using the condensation from the drink, I wondered what he would do with that; I obviously couldn’t tell if he drank from it or found it an another troubling obstruction on his walk.
- While at these theme parks in Orlando, I had ample time to think while waiting in line, which led to thinking about the logistics of lines. It would be fascinating to read a deep dive into how the engineers behind these theme parks think through waiting lines, both for regular attendees and those with express passes.
- As I waited for one of the rides, there was an instructional video across the way. It contained subtitles. As Horowitz notes in her book, humans are drawn to words and we can’t help but read those words, even if they are not of particular intrigue. I could not help but read the subtitles to this instructional video multiple times. Or when I was driving into Chicago, which took about an hour, I couldn’t help but read the same sign on the highway, “Don’t be a tosser, use the trash can.” (I think that’s what it said! That’s the other thing Horowitz noted, the older we get, the more quickly we forget unnecessary things.)
- In my very copy of the book, which I likely picked up at a used library book sale, I found a receipt for someone who previously checked the book out from the library. It’s always a thrill to find things in a book, whether it’s receipts like this, forgotten bookmarks, dedications, or scribblings (not that I favor my book being marked up!). Speaking of privacy, the receipt gives the library patron’s name, address, and telephone number. Oof.
Horowitz’s book, from walking with a toddler, geologist, bug guy, sound guy, or dog, among others, was a lovely traverse through human history, behavior, biology, as well as nonhuman history, behavior, and biology, and if I were to anthropomorphize a city, the city’s history, behavior, and biology. The funny thing is though, as Horowitz still realizes at the end, to attend takes work, conscious work, and it can be easy to lose again. Nonetheless, her book is a helpful reminder to look, to really look.
Milam's Musings 