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Even those who stop right in the middle of a sidewalk are accommodated.
One reason all of our step-sliding, pedestrian-jigging works is that we are regularly looking—ahead and at each other. We do not just look to see who is there; we constantly, steadily look to calculate how we need to move relative to those around us.
The importance of this “looking” in the success of the dance comes into play with the relatively new species of pedestrian on the street: phone talkers.
They block out their sense of someone walking too close; they fail to look into their walking ovals and step-slide out of the way. They no longer follow the rules that make walking on a crowded sidewalk go smoothly: they do not align themselves (they swerve); they do not avoid (they bump); and they do not slip behind and between others (they blunder).
Jaywalking was first used a century ago to describe the behavior of a pedestrian unaccustomed and naive (a jay being a silly person) about how to walk safely in a city.
Some research suggests that the very presence of signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, and raised curbs, all intended to make walking safer for the pedestrian in a car-filled city, actually make it less safe.
Our use of the sidewalk—as a walking path—is now so entrenched that I cannot imagine it any other way, but unobstructed mobility was not always the point of sidewalks. They were public spaces. There has always been panhandling, ware-selling, soliciting, and loitering going on among the walking.
No wonder we don’t get anywhere fast while walking: we’re half standing still.
Over time, and after millions of steps, a subtle anatomical variation turns into an acquired deformity.
Perhaps to have true empathy for one’s patients, one must know how to become a child, or a middle-aged woman, or a man with spinal stenosis and an anaerobic lung infection.
This is the principle of plasticity of the brain: especially when we are young, our brains change depending upon what we are exposed to. Even in adults, the brain is always changing: the simple fact of learning something means that neural changes have occurred—if not as radically as in youth.
The baby born blind is (relatively) lucky: her brain will reorganize. With adults, the process is less dramatic. But even those who lose their vision as adults often pick up a heightened sensory ability or two.
Kinesthesia is one of our senses—one that works within our bodies, mapping where our limbs are in space. Sensory receptors on muscles and joints give feedback to the brain, mostly without our thinking about it. Kinesthetic memory is, thus, muscle memory.
Blindness does not stop this process of developing a cognitive map; it simply obliges map-making through non-visual means.
In a city like this one, full of right angles between streets, a turned corner almost always brings with it a change in the flow of air. Though the direction and temperature of the air might vary by hour or day, the contrasting orthogonal airflow is more reliable than the particulars of street or sidewalk activity.
In normal conversation people gaze at each other only about a third of the time, with the listener looking at the speaker about twice as much as the reverse. When speaking, we mostly look not at the person we are talking to, but anywhere else—up to the sky, at our hands, out toward an indefinite segment of air. Many utterances begin with a brief look, then a turn away. (If
“Sound comes to us; noise we come upon.” (Hillel Schwartz)
What was the first sound heard? The Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who wrote about the natural soundscape, answered his own question: It was the caress of the waters.
any urban dweller grows accustomed to being barraged by an unwelcome clamor.
and not just neutral “sound” is another question. The avant-garde composer John Cage famously declared that “music is sounds,”
Still, if Cage was right, it need not follow that all sounds are music(al). Any sound we do not like we call noise, thereby introducing a subjective assessment to the din.
In the city, residents become inadvertent experts on urban sounds. I know the difference, I realized, between the sound made by a shuttle bus and a city bus; I can recognize the acoustic signature of alternate-side-of-the-street parking days; I can tell from the language spoken around me whether I am on Broadway or a block away, on Amsterdam Avenue.
In the forest, my ears are blunt instruments. In the city, they are well tuned. Sure,
There are other cross-modal components to listening. It is visual, for one thing. Close your eyes, and your hearing is more focused.
Sounds are also contagious, whether they are emitted by a living thing or a simulacrum.
In the real world, the sound is reverberating in a particular way based on the structures it is passing; the sound arriving at listening ears is changed depending on what lies between the ears and the siren. The pitch and loudness may seem steady, but they are changeable, and they are different if the listener is a block or three away.
The result of these walks on my head is tangible: they refined what I can see. My mind can prepare my eyes to spontaneously find a leaf gall, to hear an air conditioner’s hum, to smell the sickly sweet smell of garbage on a city street (or the fragrance of my own soap on my face, instead).
There could be an exhaustion in being told to look, to pay attention, to be here now: one might feel put upon, as though being chastised for being neglectful. Nearly all the people I walked with—some of whom were, in essence, professional attenders or lookers—reproached themselves for not paying good enough attention.
The unbelievable strata of trifling, tremendous things to observe are there for the observing. Look!
