Last week Shawn Micallef, who usually talks about walking in Toronto, was posting bits of a trip home to Windsor. Although I have never lived there as an adult, I was filled with a powerful homesickness as I read about walking there. Particularly because I’ve never driven much there, the geography of the city is still intimate and distorted according to my childhood memory, its places better connected in my mind by long walks than streets and blocks. The childhood beginnings and endings of journeys in the back of a station wagon were so disconnected, they might as well have been by airplane.

My father’s father was a walker. He lived on McEwan Avenue in a large gray house. I can see it on Google Maps now, too small and the wrong color, a burgundy minivan in the driveway, the tall trees gone. Although he worked at the Chrysler plant and owned a sparkling blue Chrysler with tail fins, he always preferred walking to driving. He was famous for stopping in the remote corners of parking lots and taking the long way round. He took me for long strolls, holding my hand and feeding me treats, bits of halvah or Peerless ice cream. I was four or five. I remember low things—uneven sidewalks, school yards, chain links fences, busy crossings, and the menacing thrill of boxcars and railroad tracks.

I recently binged on a bunch of fascinating but milk-of-human-kindness-curdling literature. It was a Fantastic Mr. Foxish consumption of a heap of papers and articles analyzing the scramble for status in tech culture and communication, and combined with bad-ish TV and undigested chunks of Veblen, it left me queasy and discreetly burping bubbles of doubt. Everybody suddenly looks like a bunch of sneaky apes jockeying for unripe bananas, but not in a serene, at-one-with-nature kind of way. I’m sourly aware of the numbers surrounding every small electronic contact. The numbers that Twitter displays on one’s home page make an offhand response to a stranger feel suddenly leaden and manipulative. At the same time, a clutch of quotidian anxieties and real world things-gone-just-wrong-enough are conspiring to make me feel, if not exactly oppressed, at least sat on.

I know the current onslaught of migraine and insomnia could likely explain this pinched perspective (an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato), but I feel like I’ve stumbled into a maze of dead ends. The corridor that led me here is no longer connected to the world outside and I am trying the same hallways and cul-de-sacs again and again in the feeble certainty that they are changing constantly with a restless energy. I am treading the same space in my mind again and again as I wait for it to inevitably change form enough to recognize. And meanwhile, I am actually walking.

Walking is the pace of thought.

I’m not sure how else to recapture the tenuous connection between my body and my surroundings, other than walking and watching for some familiar and recognizable story in the things right here.

Even I begin to feel transparent and ghostly after working alone for too many days. Throw in a migraine and a 3am conviction I should have gone to art school (nope) and I start to feel lost. The comparatively small internet of ten years ago was of immediate comfort in those moments, a place for introverts to connect in our own weird ways. The New Big Internet is more complicated. While I like the anonymity and enjoy many of the technologies for contact with other humans, the rigid architecture of the social structures can be grueling. I watch with admiration the way some people effortlessly navigate the relentless online social architecture. I think to myself, self, I could never do that (sober), and that these new worlds increasingly reflect the external worlds of parties and conferences and networking events and book tours in which the same people are, and always have been, equally adept. They are able to collect and cherish connections, to leave agreeable traces of themselves everywhere. They are charming and lovable. I usually admire without envy. I wish I knew the secret language of those public unions, but I don’t and if I did, I’d to be someone else.

When we set about naming our impending baby though, we wondered why it felt so important to choose a name not shared with many others and, like every other parent we know, couldn’t really come up with an answer. But I am starting to think it has something to do with an ill-articulated awareness of the growth of culture around a certain kind of person, an evolution of The Lonely Crowd‘s “other directed” human. (Also it has do with me being a Heather from the seventies.) A new kind of person whose existence, even consciousness, depends on their situation within and ability to influence their social setting. I think we are foggily aware there is a new exigency in recognition and the ability to build an unambiguously unique history. Naming your kid something genuinely nuts might be visionary.⁰¹

Don’t giggle. I think this might be more urgent than it sounds. There’s plenty to indicate that our literal worth might one day depend on our ability to scramble for social status by obsequious do-gooding in the direction of the right people (the depressing economic rendition of ingenious, lovable charm). Wealth already depends, in a more tangled way, on making oneself appealing to influential people and learning how to guess who might one day be influential in order to make small favors go farther,⁰² but there’s a lot of well-intentioned effort to make sure that the connection is even more direct and quantifiable. As horrifying as projects like The Whuffie Bank are to me,⁰³ I am a nice middle class parent whose ideals turn out to be not so stiff in the face of the oncoming inevitable as I thought they were. A lot of them are already lying flat in the street, covered with tread marks. Like most parents, I want my child to succeed where I didn’t. Projects like that confirm my suspicion that something in me is being selected against. If this is what the future looks like, perhaps Aureliano was giving up too easily. Maybe I should have considered Astrolabe a bit more seriously.

~

I just cannot stop thinking about Elif Batuman’s essay in the London Review of Books.

I just read this lovely essay by Tom Vanderbilt on Hans Monderman, traffic, distance, and the responsibility to care for one another. I am still turning it over because I have been wondering about what makes the small difference that tips us back and forth between from caring most for one another and defending ourselves. It’s often, of course, the difference between an explicit or legal contract and an implicit social contract. But what is it that makes the breach of those broad contracts irreversible? It’s the knowing I suppose, the knowledge of good and evil.

“There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn’t forbidden is allowed.”

That’s true. Why? Is this lack of explicit rules part of why we see a generosity online that is almost unthinkable in the real world? I can’t unknow that if I offer to fix the bit of my neighbor’s roof that’s raining bricks into my back yard, she can sue me if anything goes wrong. I can’t unknow how many people of my acquaintance have actually sued or been sued. Sometimes behaving with innocence is demonstrably safer than arming ourselves against all possible attack, but that’s calculated. It’s a matter of knowing the lower accident statistics of the traffic circle and still feeling afraid and wanting the traffic circle instead of the stoplight. In real life, even if we behave with the best intentions toward one another, we weigh the possibilities for humiliation (or worse) and consider the risk “rent to the ideal.”

‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil. (E. M. Forster again.)

Yet online the relationship between individuals is somehow still more innocent. Is it because the internet is still a frontier place? What will happen when there are suddenly sets of explicit rules for interacting with our peers? What will happen when the corporate drunk drivers take advantage of the generosity of individuals to swerve all over us? (Drugstore.com, give me one good reason why I should do unpaid work writing product reviews for you? I’ll do it if I damn well please. Stop harassing me.) Corporations are increasingly functioning in very personal spaces. No collective entity that exists to earn money, no matter how careful, can have the sensitivity of an individual to the nuances of these fluid, invisible agreements. Mostly they don’t even try, or worse– assume the rules simply don’t apply to them. Will we get burnt out and defensive? How long have we got? And what can we get done in the meantime?