Walking Cambridge
Originally posted April 23, 2005. See above for further entries.
Last spring I was thinking about the rural existence. At the time I took note of the following:
The flaneur is a farmer with different shoes. The wanderer, the walker, the one who experiences the environment around them with glee-- this person exists in a forrest of skyscrapers and town-homes equally as well as the empty vistas and dusty oaks of the countryside.
Rural: agricultural, country. Inhabited and conquered, in some sense, but not broken. The rural is a place where man's presence is left on the ground as much by absence as it is by presence. The cloistered courtyard siting of a farmhouse and its outbuildings, a row of trees planted to block the wind, the sound of an airplane lazily echoing off foothills, even the linear patterns of a crop or the trodden memory of cattle. These are the accumulated traces of human inhabitation spread thin across the brown land between here and there. It's quiet but not lonely and, in an inversion of the urban, gains its interest from extreme sparseness instead of high density.
Now, here in Cambridge, the weather becomes nice again and I find myself just walking. A whitewashed Concord Lane; "West Point, Harvard, Virginia;" two dog grooming salons; "noodles, espresso, ice cream, sushi." Later: a bus barrels by and standing in the front is a trench-coated woman looking for all the world like Selby's Sara Goldfarb.
Out and about a new grocery store is discovered. A nice side effect of buying frozen edamame before walking home is that you can sling the bag of groceries over your shoulder allowing the frozen mass to counteract, if barely, the rising mercury of the falling sun.