For Christmas, I got an amazing book: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places by John R. Stilgoe, professor at Harvard. He has written a number of books on coastal communities, railroads, and the American landscape. Outside Lies Magic explores exploration -- the now uncommon practice of going for a walk and observing what you see. Stilgoe is a big fan of alleys, railroad tracks, forgotten rights-of-way, and the meandering urban streams that pay little attention to man-made distinctions of property. He is fascinated by many of the same things that have animated my own interests in architecture and the city -- the gaps and seams in the urban space, forgotten snatches of landscape, straitjacketed remnants of the wild world, and the resilient hand of nature reclaiming ground.
In the first chapter, by way of introduction, Stilgoe writes: "Bicycling and walking offer unique entry into exploration itself. Landscape, the built environment, ordinary space that surrounds the adult explorer, is something not meant to be interpreted, to be read, to be understood. It is neither a museum gallery nor a television show. Unlike almost everything else to which adults turn their attention, the concatenation of natural and built form surrounding the explorer is fundamentally mysterious and often maddeningly complex. Exploring it first awakens the dormant resiliency of youth, the easy willingness to admit to making a wrong turn and going back a block, the comfortable understanding that some explorations may take more than an afternoon, the certain knowledge that lots of things in the wide world just down the street make no immediate sense. . . . It sharpens the skills and makes explorers realize that all the skills acquired in the probing and poking at ordinary space, everything from noticing nuances in house paint to seeing great geographical patterns from a hilltop almost no one bothers to climb, are cross-training for dealing with the vicissitudes of life." [p 11]
In the first chapter, by way of introduction, Stilgoe writes: "Bicycling and walking offer unique entry into exploration itself. Landscape, the built environment, ordinary space that surrounds the adult explorer, is something not meant to be interpreted, to be read, to be understood. It is neither a museum gallery nor a television show. Unlike almost everything else to which adults turn their attention, the concatenation of natural and built form surrounding the explorer is fundamentally mysterious and often maddeningly complex. Exploring it first awakens the dormant resiliency of youth, the easy willingness to admit to making a wrong turn and going back a block, the comfortable understanding that some explorations may take more than an afternoon, the certain knowledge that lots of things in the wide world just down the street make no immediate sense. . . . It sharpens the skills and makes explorers realize that all the skills acquired in the probing and poking at ordinary space, everything from noticing nuances in house paint to seeing great geographical patterns from a hilltop almost no one bothers to climb, are cross-training for dealing with the vicissitudes of life." [p 11]
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| A slightly better cover design than the edition I have. |
