On Looking: A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation

by Alexandra Horowitz

Even the feeling of time passing changes on our walk: with less to notice, time speeds up. The capacity to attend is ours; we just forget how to turn it on. The second element takes advantage of individual expertise. There is a certain bias in everyone’s perspective that has been named, by the French, déformation professionnelle: the tendency to look at every context from the point of view of one’s profession.

Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive. I myself felt I was losing the sensitivity to broken chairs left out on the street that I once had.

The shadows reminded me of the complexity of our landscape, the sheer numbers of objects on top of one another in the city.