Walking Will Cure What Ails You
On dreaming of being a walker in the city once more.
For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to walk. In part, this might be because I grew up in Los Angeles, where being a pedestrian is a mark of profound suspicion — bro, what happened to your car? — and I enjoy being ornery. Feeling the syncopated clip-clop of your feet against the pavement, watching your surroundings slowly approach and fall away, taking in the comic and profound and absurd and utterly mundane theater of city life are enough to temporarily sink your troubles and remind you, hopefully, of the profound gratitude every city dweller should feel at the prospect of being surrounded with so much bounty. We live in cities to be surrounded by the vastness of human experience in close quarters, and nothing brings this into close focus quite like walking.
It’s a condition of the crisis we are still living through that our worlds have simultaneously grown and shrunk. I am intimately aware of the progress of the vaccine rollout in Britain and Israel, but I have also left my home borough of Brooklyn and visited Manhattan approximately half a dozen times since last March. I have not walked the six blocks from the Broadway-Lafayette subway station to the building where I teach in over 13 months. I miss New York. I live in New York, but I miss New York.
