On Looking
About Everything There is to See
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses.
This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention's companion: inattention to everything else.
This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather's tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary'. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Horowitz (Inside of a Dog) turns neighborhood walks into an exploration of how people interpret the world. Each walk pairs her with a different companion, each experience offering expertise in a wildly different arena, from the fractured geology of Horowitz's native Manhattan to a city block's surprisingly abundant insect life or how blind people experience the world. Some walks playfully dip into academic specialties, as when Dr. Bennett Lorber displays his Sherlock Holmes like knack for diagnosing passersby, or when urban behaviorist Fred Kent shares his counterintuitive perspective as president of the Project for Public Spaces. Elsewhere, a sound engineer explains the "auditory restoration" phenomenon, in which the mind fills in unheard sounds, while a typographer examines fonts and lettering on signs and buildings, going so far as to distinguish between different forms of the letter "Q." Even when Horowitz leaves her home turf to venture to Philadelphia and to Springfield, Mass., or consults such dubious "experts" as her dog, Finnegan, and toddler son, her writing remains insightful. The quirks in how each individual processes the same picture provide readers with their own eyes refreshed, ready to take a good look around them.
