Familiar gravitation draws walker’s course
“As I had nothing to do that night and the weather was fair, I went out after dinner to walk and remember.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time.”
Iremember the first time I heard someone ask, “Gettin’ your steps in?” It was probably 2012 or 2013, before the Apple Watch, when the most advanced fitness trackers consisted of a watch with a pedometer that sent data to your phone.
In all fairness, I might have been doing exactly what the person asked about, as I have owned and renounced at least three Fitbit watches. As addictive gadgets go, they are surely among the least harmful. In fact, they’re a fine tool for anyone who just wants to know how far he’s walking every day.
But constant measurement and evaluation of what should be an instinctive, natural, barely-thoughtabout action imposes another layer of technologically enabled unreality on our everyday lives. Taking a walk, the simplest and least expensive of pleasures, becomes another reason to look at the phone.
Borges, in Buenos Aires, set out one evening in 1928 to walk and remember. He “had no wish to have a set destination.” He followed a random course, but, he writes, a “kind of familiar gravitation … drew me towards places whose name I shall always remember, for they arouse in me a certain reverence.”
He was not in the neighborhood of his childhood, he says, but in a border zone, “familiar and mythological at the same time.”
Borges (born in 1899) was a generation younger than Marcel Proust (born in 1871). In the works they left behind, they are meanderers, casual speculators, trying to capture those inexplicable seizures of memory and mystery that we all have, never by our own volition.
They are walkers. Slow walkers. They’re not out getting their steps in, and it’s hard to know what they’re talking about by those whose daily lives are conditioned by speeding around in cars. It’s when you’re out in the elements, moving at two or three miles an hour, that the deep memories emerge and the mysterious connection to the past can be felt.
Downtown Little Rock has been battered by urban renewal and ArDOT’s endless spending. So much has been erased by the surface parking lots (34 percent of the core city) that choke and bake us. But downtown Little Rock is also a wonderful village where I’m accustomed to seeing the same 300 faces all of the time, whether they belong to people living at the Albert Pike or going to work at Stephens.
Monday’s eclipse brought in enough strangers to enliven the neighborhood for a day or two. The eclipse itself was awesome, and, as I’ve heard many people say, not at all what we expected.
Tuesday night I walked from my house to the Clinton Presidential Center to hear the publisher emeritus of this paper interview the former executive editor of The Washington Post. Despite hard questions and bleak predictions, it was an occasion for hope, for here in one room were 250 people, bearing a healthy range of opinion, who all appeared to assent to the idea that objectivity is the object of news reporting (as opposed to trying to bend outcomes), and that truth, however elusive, is real and worth pursuing.
In other words, there’s still some sanity in Arkansas. We are not Harvard. We can still support civilized quarrels between nominal Democrats and chamber-of-commerce Republicans. A conspiracy theorist, a MAGA-ist, or a true leftist might have found evidence in the room that the fix is in; I’m taking it as evidence that there is still a center, and that it might just hold.
We got out in time to enjoy the April gloaming. The gray-purple light brought out the bright dense green on the sandbar (Cindy Miller Island), where I kicked around between rain showers to mull over the talk.
And to mull over memories. For among the 250 in the room were many faces from my shtetl, as Paul and I used to call the Heights. Many faces from that other little village a 12-minute drive away.
The two-hour walk from the Heights to downtown will give you a sense of the real distance between here and there. You can also find the distance by walking around here. It’s in a different region with its own culture and topography. Park at one of our cultural institutions and walk to another. Or to lunch. Get a feel for the place, for its past. On foot.