Skipping the L
For my walk this week, I decided to walk back to my dorm from near the North and Clybourn red line stop, instead of riding the train back to Fullerton and walking the rest of the way. I had originally ridden the L down to that stop to visit a few stores nearby. Here are my field notes, which I recorded once I got back to my dorm:
The two objects I chose to record were a spider, sitting in it’s web, and a butterfly that landed on a building next to me. I didn’t want to pick up and bring these two beings, for somewhat obvious reasons, but I have pictures:
In “The Solitary Stroller and the City,” Solnit writes, “Cities are forever spawning lists” (p. 202). Why do walking, lists, and cities seem to go together?
Walking, lists, and cities are all linked. Cities themselves could be described as one big list of lists, in a way. A list of street names, a list of buildings, a list of people, a list of monuments, a list of geographic features (like the Chicago River, or Lake Michigan), a list of experiences, etc. As we walk the city, we read through more of these lists, discovering more of the city as we walk. We, ourselves, can begin to write our own lists of the city, detailing what we’ve discovered, what we’ve seen and heard, and what we’ve experienced. Just walking a few blocks of the city could leave you with page-long lists of buildings, people, objects, sounds, smells, and more.
