The Pleasures of Circulating – thinking on foot

By Willard Spiegelman

It may seem a bit eccentric to cross the Atlantic by plane merely to take a walk. At least it would have seemed odd to me before and even during a recent excursion to England. But afterward, it also made sense, in a quirky way. On my transoceanic return flight, with plenty of time to reflect on what the previous week meant, I had something of a revelation. It came to me that I had gone to London because I wanted to breathe by stretching my legs; I had wanted to think on foot.

Let me clarify, first of all, what I was not doing. I did not go to London intent on making a pilgrimage, nor did I use the city as the deliberate starting point for one. Pilgrimages have a specific purpose as well as a geographical termination. They often involve the mortification of the flesh. Chaucer’s fourteenth-century pilgrims wended their way to Canterbury in order, presumably, to seek penitence at the shrine of St. Thomas, and also to shake winter from their bodies once April’s sweet showers began to relieve human dryness as well as natural drought. Nor did I go purely to take exercise. I could have done that at home. There were some nominal purposes for my trip (to visit friends, plan an academic meeting, go to some museums, see some theater), but I realized in retrospect that these were, at best, nugatory excuses. What I understood on my return flight was something that in fact had existed beneath the thin upper layer of my consciousness all along: I had gone to experience the enjoyment — unavailable to me on home ground — of strolling, to delight in what Wallace Stevens called “the pleasures of merely circulating,” to act the role of the nineteenth-century flâneur, the walker in the city, as well as in city parks and nearby rural scenes.

Only recently have people become interested in why we walk, and for what reasons. When walking meant working, when it was the primary means of human locomotion, who would have cared about it? But today, writing about walking addresses the issues of who we are, and of the substance of our lives this late in human history.

Several years ago I flew to San Diego for a conference. Waking up very early the morning after my arrival, I looked at the tourist brochures and realized that Balboa Park, site of the celebrated city zoo and the museums, a beautiful and renowned piece of urban landscape, lay about three miles or so from my harborside hotel. I asked the young parking valets hanging around the hotel’s front door whether it would be a pleasant walk through the city from the Marriott to the park. They looked incredulous, indeed bewildered: “Oh no, sir. We don’t think you can walk there from here.”

“Why not?” I replied, showing them the map. “It certainly doesn’t look too far away.”

“Perhaps not,” they helpfully responded, “but it’s all uphill and will take at least forty-five minutes.”

Nothing daunted, I asked the boys whether they went to a gym. (I was reminded of a New Yorker cartoon picturing gym addicts standing in front of an elevator to head upstairs, a sign reading to the stairmaster right beside the staircase.) The fellows allowed as they did. “Well, guys, here’s a modest suggestion: you might try walking outside, in the beautiful California weather, as a substitute activity.” Later in the day, having made the hike uphill, examined zoo and museums, eaten lunch, window-shopped, and walked (downhill) home, I confronted the same young men and pointed out to them that I had returned safe and sound, and they might in the future recommend to other easterners or equivalent oddballs the walk to the park. They were relieved if bemused to learn that I had lived to tell the tale of my dangerous excursion. Had no one ever asked them about this before?

Like me, these young men lived in real, modern America, where, by and large, unhurried walking is not a possibility, except in small towns and the larger, mostly eastern cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, even Washington) built before the age of the automobile and containing successful mass-transit systems. Soon after my San Diego adventure, I was visiting German friends in Cologne who asked, “Why are you Americans so obsessed with going to the gym?” I had to remind them that people who go to gyms are, for the most part, defined significantly by class and income bracket; they are educated and have leisure time. But even more important is the fact that unless an American who does not live by physical labor makes a concerted effort to exercise, he gets none. My German friends, both in their mid-sixties, live on the fifth floor of a somewhat shabby but sturdy old-fashioned apartment building. There is no elevator. They have walked up and down their stairs, often four and five times a day, with groceries and heavier packages, for thirty years. They do not need a gym.

Dallas, my latest residence, offers plenty of resistance to walkers. For one thing, it is big; for another, it is mostly ugly; and for a third, it is hot much of the year. Taken individually, none of these obstacles should in theory prevent pedestrian activity. But combined, they make it unpleasant if not impossible to stroll about. Like many modern American cities, Dallas consists of a spider’s web of discrete residential communities, joined and intersected by freeways and large streets that often lack sidewalks, with neighborhood shopping centers as mini-nodes, enormous malls as larger nodes, and a downtown area that has survived without round-the-clock activity until just recently, when brave urban pioneers decided to repopulate it and turn it into livable space. The automobile is king.

Unlike many smaller or more temperate cities, Dallas can’t even boast many bike riders other than people who mount their bikes on top of their cars and then drive to a lake or a rural park. Bicycles are largely invisible on the city streets because we have no bike paths and because the proliferation of SUVs and similar wide vehicles has meant that the daring cyclist is these days even more imperiled on the road. There is simply not enough space for cars and bikes on the streets. Pedestrians are somewhat less endangered. But years ago, when the local police caught sight of someone taking a leisurely stroll in a residential neighborhood, they might pull over and inquire what he was doing, and then, if that person looked at all suspicious (read: nonwhite), escort him to the proper destination. Now that we have the early morning and late afternoon, or pre- and postprandial, health addicts doing their cardiovascular best, at least we see people on the streets, but a determined exerciser is not quite the same as a casual walker.

And in a city that has two seasons — summer and all the rest — and bad air quality for much of the year, there’s little chance for and almost no enjoyment in walking to work, even if one has a relatively short distance to negotiate. Except in truly arctic weather, you can always add layers of clothing for insulation and go outside for fun, but there is a limit to how much you can take off in the heat. In the land made possible by air-conditioning, one stays enclosed within cars, offices, homes, and even gated communities. Self-protection is the point, and it produces isolation. Exposure and mingling are shunned in favor of safety. Rebecca Solnit, whose Wanderlust: A History of Walking offers a marvelously capacious guide to the physical and literary terrain, ignores weather as a factor that enhances, or inhibits, the pleasures of this most natural activity. Even people in Dallas who live close enough to walk from home to work cannot do so, because for almost half the year they’d arrive moist and sticky.

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Like walking to a destination, walking in order to build up one’s heart rate and to break a sweat is just not the same as walking, pure and simple. Immanuel Kant defined art as Zwecklichkeit ohne Zweck (“purposefulness without purpose”), and the art of walking, like the other, more permanent arts, often has no function other than itself. At the same time, even to call it an art is to exaggerate its status: everyone knows how to do it, and no one after the age of two requires training in the doing, just in the wanting to do. What does it mean to be a good or excellent walker? That you go faster or farther than everyone else? Walking cannot be perfected, nor can it even be improved. Even more, every new walk both repeats and varies previous ones. You cannot cross the same street twice. As A. R. Ammons observes in his poem “Corsons Inlet,” “tomorrow a new walk is a new walk,” even if over the same territory. For Ammons, meandering through the sandy terrain of southern New Jersey, a dune is as much an event in time — it always changes its shape — as in space.

Neither weather nor distance nor the certain fact of unappealing vistas or tedious sameness ever got in the way of Ammons or Kant (who famously never left Königsberg but strolled up and down it every day), or prevented Søren Kierkegaard in Copenhagen from walking and thinking. Nor did climate or sameness prevent two of America’s most famous poet-walkers from trekking back and forth between work and home. Wallace Stevens diligently walked the two miles from house to insurance office in downtown Hartford, all the while composing poems in his head. Later on, Howard Nemerov walked to classrooms and office at Washington University from his suburban St. Louis home, observing acorns, foliage, neighborhood dogs, changes in the weather, and the daily round of ordinary life that became the substance of his poetry. The scholar Roger Gilbert has written an entire book, Walks in the World, on the subject of poets walking. They do not — at least primarily — walk for cardiovascular health. They walk in order to compose their thoughts, a process necessary to both Nemerov’s witty observations and Stevens’s deeper, more abstruse ones. Paul Klee said of his paintings: “I take a line out for a walk.” Alexander Calder might have said the same thing about his mobiles and stabiles, taking a wire and extending it into three-dimensional fullness. The English artist Richard Long took Klee’s aphorism literally when he created his “Line Made by Walking” in 1967; he drew a line with his feet, so that walking became the actual medium as well as the subject of his art.

Those artists who work with words and ideas instead of material objects — they especially know how thinking and moving occupy separate but parallel spheres. Instead of taking a line out for a walk, poets take a walk in order to get a line, or all the lines of entire poems. The process of the walk involves mind, body, and breath (literally the spirit) in a harmonious process that at once releases and excites different kinds of energies. Wordsworth, who notoriously hated the act of taking pen in hand to write (he became literally nauseated), used to pace in his garden, up and back, composing in his head, thereby creating an analogy between the turns of his body and the turns of lines of verse. And it was surely no coincidence that Coleridge stopped writing blank verse, that basic English form, when he stopped walking for pleasure.

Strolling used to be an American custom, but it hasn’t been for a long time. It remains a powerful one in most European countries, especially in the Mediterranean, where an afternoon siesta makes sense during the heat of the day, followed by a reawakening in the evening, and then a promenade, a passeggiata, or in Germanic countries a Spaziergang. The courtship ritual of the paseo allows young couples to be alone in public. Wandering one late Sunday afternoon in summer on the Janiculum hill in Rome, I noticed that amid the strollers — young and old, fat and thin, single, in couples, and in larger groups — the only people moving at a more intense pace were the determined American joggers, oblivious of the pine trees, the views, and the fresh air, and impervious to everything except their pulse rates and the chore at hand. The soft twilight was beginning to lay its mantle upon the hills and vistas. Families were walking slowly, courteously, and arm-in-arm. The scene, and the view, put me in mind of Garibaldi’s description of Rome as “the greatest theater in the world.” Never did running seem so inappropriate. Irving Berlin’s song from Miss Liberty, “Let’s Take an Old-Fashioned Walk,” specified an activity that was antique even in 1949; in some quarters, it would be positively unthinkable today. Ditto Berlin’s “Easter Parade” — which is really a promenade, not a parade — immortalized in the 1949 film that ends with Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Ann Miller and her dogs, and an MGM cast of thousands, all in fancy dress and hats, on the avenue, snapped by photographers.

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So I went to London — as I often go to Venice, that uniquely labyrinthine city where one is always but never really lost — to take a walk. Walking through unfamiliar cities or ones only slightly known, with a map available but frequently ignored, affords a high pleasure similar to that won on rural jaunts. Along with Manhattan, London and Venice are the metropolises I know best. Paris is close behind them. Walking in cities offers the wonderful combination of solitude and togetherness. Being alone in a crowd means not being alone at all, except in the caverns of one’s own consciousness. The mind works constantly but it has always seemed that the thoughts that come to me on my feet are somehow sharper, more interesting, and more surprising than others that come, say, in the car or the shower.

On Memorial Day last year, walking alone in New York City, I had a vivid flash and then a reminder of a comparable day exactly twenty years earlier, when two friends and I took off on a bright and sunny holiday morning in a convertible from Manhattan, drove across the East River through Queens to Brighton Beach and Coney Island, took a wrong turn and ended up on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, landed in Staten Island, said “what the hell, we’ve been to four of the five boroughs,” and then drove home via the Bronx just to be able to say that we’d done all of New York on a beautiful day in an open car. Our driving escapade was the exact opposite of a walking experience, but it now lives doubly in my mind (as the original and then in the subsequent epiphany): the sameness of weather brought about a Proustian recollection, years later, on foot. Another car ride probably would not have had the same effect. Slowness fits the mind’s operations much better than speed.

And walking alone, rather than with a partner, gives the double pleasure of setting and then changing the pace, rather than compromising with someone else. Unapologetically, you can make last-minute, arbitrary, if not downright mercurial, adjustments in direction or purpose. You wander with the uncertainty of the wind itself, but ever-grounded by the asphalt and the surrounding architecture. You want to pop into a shop? Feel free. You want to take a sudden turn down a tempting alley? Go ahead. Sit in a café for no reason? Not a problem. You want to go out of your way and cross a bridge just to take in the view from the other side? No one will stop you. “He travels fastest who travels alone,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, and that goes for mere city walks as well as for more exotic peregrinations. Slow or fast: you set your own pace because you have embarked on an adventure that is life in miniature.

Only recently in western history have cities been safe and clean and therefore appealing to leisure walkers. In the eighteenth century few people walked the city streets for pleasure. You took your life in your hands whenever you stepped out-of-doors. Garbage and thieves abounded. Cities were unsavory. John Gay’s “Trivia: or the Art of Walking the Streets of London” is full of admonitions. At the end of the century, in “London,” William Blake lists the sights and, even more, the sounds of the city, none of them agreeable: “marks of weakness, marks of woe,” “the mind-forg’d manacles,” “the chimney-sweeper’s cry,” “the soldier’s sigh,” “the youthful harlot’s curse.” Much of the horror still exists, of course, although pushed off to peripheries along with other signs of loucheness and ugliness, and many major urban destinations have developed a kind of theme-park approach to tourism.

Still, what excites is the combination of the ordinary and the unexpected. Rebecca Solnit cites the “anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking,” that cities offer. To these I must add surprise: there is pleasure in being in a new neighborhood, which looks in part like one’s own but is of course foreign. And then the conjunction of sameness and difference has an additional thrill. A bakery in St. Louis is not the same as one on the Île St. Louis in Paris even if they have almost identical pastries. Coincidences and human encounters occur as frequently on foreign as on familiar terrain, but the ones that occur abroad always outlast the domestic ones in memory.

In London I recalled Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, who strides out one fine June morning to buy the flowers for her party, and breathes in the heady mixture of freshness and beauty from a day in spring. Any tourist in London can experience a rich synaesthetic brew of enticements. “I love walking in London.... Really it’s better than walking in the country,” Clarissa says to her friend Hugh Whitbread, whom she runs into in Westminster. Mrs. Dalloway was ambling on home ground. I was not. For someone like me, so long a resident of Texas, the mere fact of lilacs in redolent bloom and chestnut trees in stately blossom (both species unavailable in Dallas) gave promise of sensuous bliss. Did I go to London just to see some trees? Familiar but now also exotic, the aromatic lilacs and great-rooted chestnuts touched me. “In the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June”: thus Woolf’s homage to the moment when everyone turns out-of-doors, whether after a wet winter or (like Mrs. Dalloway) after the horrors of a world war. Mild temperatures, the always present possibility of mist and rain, the necessity of layering one’s clothing (put the slicker on, take the slicker off; open the umbrella, close the umbrella) all mean that an English walk will be a physical activity engaging many somatic conditions.

In the same way that Central Park is Manhattan’s greatest work of art, so Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent’s, and the other large greenswards in central London give nature a chance to take hold within urban life: rus in urbe, as Horace put it. Hyde Park is democratic, vast, and open, with playing fields and riding paths, joggers as well as strollers, people going somewhere purposefully and other people going nowhere. Russell Square and the smaller Bloomsbury quadrangles with fountains and sculptures also provide seasonal verdure, odors that combat the traffic fumes, and much-needed benches. On a still smaller scale, and in a different way, the mysterious quiet of enclosed London residential squares that only key-holders may enter gives one visible access to spaces one cannot penetrate.

These inaccessible private squares serve as oases of calm a block or so from major thoroughfares. One wanders away from the Victoria and Albert Museum, away from the bustle of the Old Brompton Road, and finds oneself in Onslow or Harrington Gardens, or the Boltons, gardens and squares that seem to be of another time as well as of an entirely different physical dimension. One becomes aware of a spatial rhythm as one moves from enlarged, open, and commercial areas to private, domestic ones. This rhythm is perhaps even more noticeable in Paris, in which the sumptuous grandeur of Haussmann’s grands boulevards intersects with the intimacies of smaller streets leading away from them and into tranquil side pockets that always feel like cul-de-sacs even if they are not. And, especially as twilight begins to descend in either of these cities, one has the related pleasure of catching glimpses of the life within the houses, of furnishings, paintings, and sometimes the residents themselves, available mostly unintentionally to the passerby.

As a spectator, one takes part vicariously in the lives of others; one imagines what it might be like to be inside. The window into a room is also a mirror of one’s finest dreams and aspirations. It occurred to me that a single person inside looking out is inevitably more isolated than the single person outside looking in. All the lonely people in Edward Hopper paintings, alienated and alone even when in clusters, inhabit interior spaces. Being cut off — from an enclosed garden or a glowing, firelit parlor — encourages compensatory feelings of imaginative warmth. The simultaneous sense of community and singularity is felt most keenly in urban settings. The late American poet Amy Clampitt was airplane-averse and traveled whenever possible by bus. It was a way, she said, of being alone with other people. A solo walk through a cityscape can give the sense of invisibility — Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” on Concord Common and Isherwood’s “I am a camera” in Berlin Stories — at the same time that it nurtures you with the satisfaction of mingling with the throng. Just brushing up against other people at street corners ensures greater human contact than a lifetime of commuting in air-conditioned cars, windows rolled up. Basking alone while walking in the company of strangers is the equivalent — in action — of a stationary Quaker meeting. It increases both inner awareness and an imaginative sympathy with, and for, other people.

Like all travel, by whatever means, walking signifies change. In the same way that one experiences the commonplace and the exotic simultaneously or in swift succession, one can also revise oneself when traveling. Such reinvention, or even modest self-modification, may never get beyond the limit of one’s own consciousness. It’s another splendid advantage of traveling alone: you can remake yourself. You can adopt a disguise without even putting on a wig or changing clothes. You pretend to yourself that you are a different person. In fact, when traveling you are a different person. And there is amusement to be had — as I have often found — in wandering into art galleries on New Bond Street, or anywhere else in Mayfair, and pretending to be a serious collector. In my case, the guise (never, I am sure, believed for even a moment) is that of a mildly eccentric and thoroughly knowledgeable Texas petro-millionaire with an interest in whatever is being shown. People who work in galleries are hired for, or trained to have, good manners, so we play a game of mutual flirtation. Although being away from native soil is helpful it is hardly necessary for this game: last spring I wandered into Christie’s in Rockefeller Center, then preparing for its big spring auction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. The place was like a museum without an entrance fee. In one room I stood eyeballing at close range a delectable Joseph Cornell box, a magical surreal world in miniature; when I glanced to my left I saw Steve Martin. I looked at him, and he at me, and there we were: two men of the world eyeing a potential purchase. “I’ll fight you for it,” I said. We smiled and wandered off in our separate directions. I shall never know whether his outing was successful or even whether he was actually in the market for something or just — like me — looking, but his fortuitous presence certainly made my experience memorable even without a single purchase.

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For many tourists, shopping is itself purpose as well as purposefulness. Depending on the state of currency, Americans have gone to Europe to pick up bargains, and more recently Italians of my acquaintance have come to Manhattan, not to buy American or Japanese electronic goods but to look for Armani and Missoni clothing that, for some reason understood only by international economists, is cheaper abroad than at home. It’s easy to scoff at shoppers, but shopping constitutes a viable, important, and indeed interesting activity, so I long ago stopped turning up my nose at the large groups of my countrymen buying Wedgwood, or Harris tweeds, or Scottish cashmere, or antique silver, or whatever they wanted in Great Britain. One of the pleasures of merely circulating, as Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin well knew, is being taken in mid-stroll, captivated by some eye-catching window display that encourages the non-buyer to look, to enter, to engage in conversation, and perchance to buy. Every first-time tourist feels the need of bringing home gifts for family and friends; most sensible people have given up on this, if only because in an international, web-based economy, there very well may be no bargains left, and certainly everything is available everywhere all the time. But some years ago, on my first trip to Rome, I — a confirmed non-shopper in my real life — had a serendipitous experience that would never have occurred had window-peeping and then buying not been my motives.

Walking down the Via Giulia, I saw a shop that sold leather goods. In the window was a selection of key rings, each of them a chain holding a leather rectangle with an embossed initial or two. I thought to myself that several of these items — lightweight, unbreakable, and inexpensive — would make perfect gifts for a half dozen people who might be charmed by them. For once, I had forgotten my Italian dictionary, but ever-confident, I strode into the shop. “Buon giorno, Signore,” I said to the shopkeeper, and “Buon giorno” came back at me. I had done my calculations, based on my Italian — equal parts restaurant menus, Dante, and opera — and then proceeded: “Quanto costano questi anelli di chiave nella finestra?” He looked at me blankly and shrugged. So I repeated myself, in the ridiculous way that linguists have assured us is natural, universal and, indeed, helpful. Louder and slower, again the question came: “Quanto costano questi anelli di chiave nella finestra?” Still no glimmer of recognition, so I led him outside and pointed to the key rings in the window. I had figured it this way: because I knew French better than Italian (although everything ultimately becomes a kind of Esperanto when I speak), finestra must be the equivalent of fenêtre. In the first act of La Bohème, Mimi is searching for her chiave on the darkened stairway, and in Gianni Schicchi the heroine sings to her “babbino caro” that she wants to go to the Porta Rossa “per comperar’ un anello.” So, “how much is that key ring in the window?” became in my translation a question that I thought any sensible Roman would understand.

Of course, I was wrong. As it turned out, the proper word for a shop window is vetrina, and the key chain is a “carry-key,” a portachiave. Once we understood one another and had our hearty laugh, I made my purchases and we cemented our deal with a glass of grappa. What had begun as a passeggiata had turned into a modest shopping foray and then developed into a personal encounter with a polyglot joke at its climax. I could not have been more pleased. For a literary academic with little taste for dangerous physical adventure (no trekking in the Himalayas, motorcycling across the Sahara, journeys to the Poles, or even camping out under the stars), my most exciting travel moments occur in civilized countries where I know just enough of the language to be challenged but not enough to feel entirely comfortable. It’s the perfect combination: modest discomfort and uncertainty, but never fear and trembling.

Another memory — also linguistic but not commercial — comes back to me. On my only trip to Germany, I had flown to Frankfurt from Dallas, a nine-hour trip, waited several hours for a train, and then proceeded south in the off-season to Bayreuth in Bavaria. Checking into my hotel on a beautiful October morning and thoroughly jet-lagged, I decided not even to think about lying down, for fear of never getting up. Instead, I consulted the map and walked up the holy hill to Wagner’s Festspielhaus in order to pay it homage. Then I descended back into the town, whose central part is closed to automobile traffic. I rested on a bench, having already taken my bearings and put away the map I had been studying. Two German women, tourists of a certain age, approached me and asked, “Entschuldigen Sie, aber ist das das Neue Schloss?” “Nein, Gnädige Frauen,” I answered, not missing a beat, “das ist nicht das Neue Schloss sondern das Alte Schloss. Das Neue Schloss ist um die Ecke.” “Danke schön,” said they, and “Bitte schön” said I, after which I broke into giggles inspired by my excellent tour-guide sensibilities and my imperfectly recollected year of German 101 from decades before. I had been of use; I felt like an authority; I was — sort of — at home in a place and a language, neither of which I could reasonably have claimed to know. And all because I had decided to venture out to take a walk.

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When language changes, walking and the entire exploratory adventure also change, as these two anecdotes demonstrate. But of all the world’s cities, Venice is the one that most thoroughly engages my walking eagerness, for both the obvious, and also more personal, reasons. Even if one is semi-infirm or chooses to rely almost exclusively on gondolas, water-taxis, and elevators, the feet are still the primary mode of transport. Bridges over canals are stairmasters avant la lettre. Pedestrian life is all that Venice affords, but the city repays the demands of walking in manifold ways. It is by now a cliché to say that the city has been frozen in time, has become a living museum if not a theme park; that it exists only as a tourist attraction or an inflated mercantile outlet whose full-time population has fallen below 100,000; that life in La Serenissima has become a mere simulacrum; that the city has never entered the twentieth, let alone the twenty-first century. All of this is true and irrelevant. Elizabethan travelers to Venice complained of bad food and price-gouging; the canals have always exuded their malodorous fumes; the acqua alta has become worse and the city has been sinking for as long as anyone can remember. The aptly named Fenice Opera House symbolizes the immortality of the entire city: it burns, it rises from the ashes, and then art and life go on.

Everything that can be said of Venice has been said before, including the fact that everything has been said before. But every visitor has his own story to tell, unique to him although resembling everyone else’s. (A couple of years ago I was walking behind a group of American midwestern tourists who had clearly not done any preparatory reading. The lady in front of me turned to her companion and said with wonder: “You mean they don’t have cars anywhere in Venice?”) On my first trip to Venice, twenty years ago, I stayed in a pensione on the Zattere, overlooking the wide expanses of the Giudecca Canal. Next door was a similar establishment that featured a plaque announcing that Ruskin had lived there. Both of them catered primarily to the English tourist trade, and the meals — both dinner and supper — seemed to argue in favor of a culinary entente cordiale: overcooked spaghetti with canned tomato sauce followed by well-done roast beef and potatoes. Who cared? I awoke the first morning, gazed out over canal and waterscape and said, “Oh good, it’s all still there.”

Venice disappoints some people; its fantasy-land ambience has never lost its appeal to me. On our first day at the English pensione my friend and I found Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound’s longtime companion and by then essentially his widow of fifteen years, at the noontime meal. She was small and birdlike; although the weather was warm, she was swathed in a fur coat. Escorted by an ardent American academic who was grilling her for information about Pound, she seemed happy to act the role of keeper of the flame and tell her stories to anyone who would listen over coffee.

The next night, we were to dine at a recommended restaurant appropriately called La Corte Sconta. This courtyard was hidden, all right, so much so that it was impossible to get explicit directions on how to reach it. The helpful padrone at the hotel told us, “Just take the number five vaporetto, get off at San Zaccaria, and then ask someone.” Obedient, we did just so. We inquired of the first person on the riva who looked possibly local how to get to the restaurant. “Walk down this small canal, turn right, and then ask someone,” she said. And so it went: walk a hundred yards, turn left, and ask. Walk fifty yards, turn right, and ask. We made it to the restaurant, tucked far away and yet not very distant at all. Coming home, we reversed the process; it did not occur to us to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, which probably would have been eaten by pigeons before we could make use of them.

In his 1969 book Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, Bernard Rudofsky makes the provocative point that Manhattan is not such a spectacular city for perambulating precisely because of its rectangular grids. (Presumably, old New York — everything south of Fourteenth Street — gets a different kind of treatment because of its warren of nooks and crannies.) Rudofsky prefers Italian cities with piazzas, squares both large and small, which function as havens, gathering points that offer openness, camaraderie, and community between the times of linear movement along streets. By this standard, Venice must be the most civilized city, not just in Piazza San Marco, which Napoleon called the world’s greatest drawing room, but in all the smaller squares, where children play soccer, grandmothers gossip and keep watch over their flocks, tourists rest their weary feet, and in good weather everyone eats ice cream and takes the sun after being shadowed in narrow passageways. “Now a landscape, now a room,” Walter Benjamin called Paris, in his famous essay on Baudelaire. In the Mediterranean, especially in warm weather, the boundaries between outdoors and indoors become permeable. Public and private spheres mingle happily; family life can be lived out-of-doors, consequently making “private life” something of an oxymoron.

If the Venetian campi, or squares (never actually square, of course), large ones like the Campi Santa Margherita and San Polo, and smaller, vest-pocket ones, provide opportunities for sociability — either experienced or merely observed — other open spaces in Venice expose one to gloom, isolation, existential coldness. It’s always easy to get away from it all, even in such a small city. Once you move out of the major tourist venues — from San Marco, the Accademia, the Rialto, the train station — Venice is nothing but small enclaves and relatively bare spaces with a combination of ordinary domestic life and silent vistas, houses that appear empty, human life either locked within or long departed. The entire district of the Arsenale, to the east of San Marco, is a relatively flat, open space with a single straight thoroughfare, Via Garibaldi, that looks like a modest shopping street in any Italian city. Especially in the northern reaches of the city, along the Fondamenta Nuove in Canareggio, Tintoretto’s home parish, one gets the sense of exposure to the elements: the lagoon stretches far and wide. Such exposure comes often as a relief from the claustrophobia many people feel within the city’s maze. It also reminds one of real life.

Just as enormous tourist boats fill the basin of San Marco and line the mouth of the Grand Canal, so also big freighters and other commercial vessels pervade the Giudecca Canal and the northern expanse of the lagoon, giving on to the industrial city of Mestre on the mainland, the home of many of the people who actually work in Venice. The spatial rhythm I noted in London exists both more spectacularly and more subtly in Venice, and often moves in an opposing way. In London one often seeks the cool respite afforded by small parks and squares, even if they are exclusive, gated, and forbidden, as a way of avoiding city bustle. In Venice one often wants expansiveness, busyness, and signs of normal life. On my first Venetian trip I took the vaporetto to the Lido, not just to walk along the beach and see the casinos but also to be reminded of urban life. The island of the Lido has streets. And trees, and lawns. It has cars! It made me feel coarse at the time, but I have never been happier to be reminded of Henry Ford’s internal combustion engine: breathing the gasoline fumes I felt I was breathing in the air of real life, and I could then return to the rarefied precincts of museums, Gothic palazzi, Palladian churches, and tiny passageways with comfort and assurance. Even in San Marco, however, modernity has made its incursions. One June day several summers ago I was strolling near the Ducal Palace overlooking the basin and came upon an American-style “spin” class, led by an aggressive man barking orders to anyone who wanted to rent a stationary bicycle, listen to blaring rock music, and watch his two voluptuous, spandex-suited, bike-pedaling female assistants onstage get a workout and sweat a lot. So much for an old-fashioned promenade.

We think of Venice as a boisterous place, a fleshpot, a gambler’s paradise, the city of carnival, masks, and masquerades. But it is also the city of Robert Browning’s “dear dead women, with such hair too,” the famed courtesans of yore. Venice bade farewell to these women, and to the flesh, centuries ago. Its only real temptations are to the eye and to the mind. More than a living city it resembles a necropolis, in the raised cemetery on the separate island of San Michele and also in the memento mori of real figures — the inevitable beggars — and fictive, death-in-life ones like those in Don’t Look Now, Nicholas Roeg’s eerie 1973 film, or like Thomas Mann’s Gustave von Aschenbach, longing for Tadzio and succumbing to self-delusion, madness, and then dissolution on the Lido. Venice is sad, and not only in winter or under conditions of fog. Night-walking in Venice is different from night-walking anywhere else. What seems sinister or louche in art — in Visconti’s Senso and almost all the other films set in Venice, as well as in all the historical literature — has long since vanished. On my first trip I was alone one evening, walking as though through a ghost town. Literally so: everyone goes to Venice during the day but by night it has emptied out. Even if one were looking for adventure there would be none to be found. It’s a day-tripper’s destination. Of course some tourists stay over, but the hotels are expensive, and many economical travelers prefer to stay on the mainland and come over in daylight.

Venice’s quiet is reassuring, however, rather than creepy, even in the dead of winter. Some of this quality has to do with scale: you seldom look across wide expanses of the sort you might see if you were in the middle of Hyde Park at night. Even in Piazza San Marco at its most bare, “beauty breaks in everywhere” as Emerson once observed of nature, not culture. One February night I sat in the Caffé Florian looking out at a dusting of snow on the plaza: it was like watching a confectioner add sugar to a cake. Wherever you gaze, even after windows have been shuttered, there’s always some modest sign of human life, a light behind a curtain or a screen. You hear footsteps behind you in a dark corner and you feel at ease rather than threatened.

Venice is a maze, a labyrinth, but one without a center. The pleasure of random wandering comes in large part from the knowledge that eventually you’ll get where you are going — even, or especially, if not right away. Venice-as-maze engages rather than frustrates. Wherever you are, you will see signs that say to the rialto, to san marco, to the accademia, or to the rail station. It is as impossible to get lost as it is to find your destination. There are no straight lines, no short routes. Even if you know your way from one place to another and you make the choice or the mistake of venturing down a previously unexplored alley or passageway, you’ll get lost and find out that there are no parallel routes. It’s not the same as going down Fifth Street instead of Seventh Street. “You can’t get there from here,” as they say, but of course you can, and eventually you do.

One cold February night, attending a cultural conference near Piazza San Marco but staying with friends near the Frari, I was walking home late, alone. I thought I had memorized the proper turns, but evidently I had gone astray. A light was on in a small local taverna, and I entered and said to the barkeeper, “Buona sera, Signore; io sono perduto.” “Ma no,” he helpfully replied, “Lei non è perduto; Lei è qua!” He was right: I was there, and there turned out to be right around the corner (if “corner” is the correct word) from where I was supposed to be. I was coming from the opposite direction: north, south, right, left are all meaningless ideas in Venice, even in daylight, when it’s all but impossible to take one’s bearings by the sun, which is often hidden by roofs, towers, and narrow streets. One salutary brandy later, I left the bar, turned the corner, and came home.

Time, “ever that Everest among concepts” according to the late James Merrill, exists in everyone’s life in both a linear and a circular way. Each of us moves forward from cradle to the inevitable end. Every life is like a walk: some follow a more or less straight path, others take unexpected, unpredictable turns. We go out, we leave home, we land elsewhere, often we return home. Constant, repeated movement is our daily progress, even though repetition may often fool us into thinking that we are going nowhere fast. “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” one of Wallace Stevens’s faux–nursery rhyme poems, begins with the sound of a round:

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

What sounds like sheer tedium, in rhythm, rhymes, and repeated words, Stevens calls “pleasures.” As I remarked at the start of this essay, pedestrian life gives access to greater-than-pedestrian experiences. The ordinariness of the daily round opens us to discoveries of self and of world. The garden moves with the angel, the angel with the clouds, and finally the clouds dissolve into one another. Stevens has begun what looks like a list, something linear, which then turns in upon itself, undoing our expectation of something greater. From garden to angels to clouds: we are waiting for something else to follow “clouds,” but it’s clouds all the way in a gentle, nebulous intensity. They are like us. Always on the move, always flying “round” like the clouds, we are never lost because we are going nowhere. As the bartender said to me that cold February night in Venice, we are here, wherever that may be.

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Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the editor in chief of Southwest Review. His latest book is How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry (Oxford University Press). This essay will be part of a larger work entitled An Anatomy of Sanguinity.