Shawn Huelle

We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.

This post's title is the last two sentences (as translated by Tom Whalen) of Robert Walser's short story, "A Little Ramble."

Here are two quotations from City of Glass by Paul Auster:

from page four:

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body, By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again.

from page sixty-one:

Quinn was used to wandering. His excursions through the city had taught him to understand the connectedness of inner and outer. Using aimless motion as a technique of reversal, on his best days he could bring the outside in and thus usurp the sovereignty of inwardness. By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair. Wandering, therefore, was a kind of mindlessness.

I took a walk this evening. It was up and down a couple of streets I've walked dozens of times, so I had seen before what I was looking at tonight, and there was nothing new. But there should have been. Shouldn't there have been something new? Impossible to step in the same river twice, and all that? (Heraclitus, of course, and according to Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, buried himself up to the neck in shit, and cured himself of dropsy, but that seems to have little to do with the topic at hand.) It concerns me, this nothing new on old streets, because it is either a problem with the streets (too sterile and suburban even here in the middle of the "city"), or it is a problem with me. I'm voting (right at the moment) for the latter, because if I stop to think about it:

• I walked, without properly acknowledging any of it/them, through the midst of a young family (mom, dad, two kids under the age of 5, and a small, gray dog) as they were moving between their house and their car. • I noted two different Russian olive trees, and the romanticness (as opposed to romance?) of their crookedness (I've noted them before, but they are awesome every time I see them). • In the pizza parlor I visited, I overheard a conversation between the clerk and a man who wanted to know how to get to the intersection of Alameda and Exposition (which are parallel to one another).

And so yes, now that I've managed to re-internalize all of that external . . . ness, yes, it really must be my problem. This is not nowhere, exactly, but—

I cannot allow myself a cheap joke using this blog's title.