The Literature of Walking

 Walking in Bloomington can easily make me despise the type of people who come here for school. These are the people who make their presence known without having ever seen them. Nan Shepard said, "Man might be a thousand years away. Yet, as I look around me, I am touched at many points by his presence." This quote could mean many things, but I find it most impactful in the sense that much of what we use turns into waste, and this waste can be seen all around us. I find myself thinking of this quote nearly daily on my walk to the bus, as I see beer cans and shattered glass regularly. Beer cans that must be cleaned up out of the kindness of others' hearts, and glass that runs the risk of puncturing an animal's foot. My friend, half jokingly, repeated the phrase, "Every day is Earth Day when we live here," and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I struggle to understand the mindset behind those who leave behind so much of their presence; do they ...

  After living in Bloomington for almost four years,  I have frequented some spots more than others.  I have found that Bloomington has a sort of natural beauty that I had never expected to find before coming here for school. In fact, I   couldn’t  even  tell  you where Bloomington was on a map before my senior year of high school ,  and I have lived in Indiana my whole life.  Though   Bloomington has a population of  roughly  80,000  people ,  IU student s make up ove r half of that number.  Once you escape campus and the surrounding residential  areas,  Bloomington   has  beautiful, forested  areas.  It is in these areas where I have  made  some of my best memories as  a student:   as far from campus as I can  get  while  remaining  within the bounds of the  town .  The  natural beauty   and biodiversity,  amongst ...

The birds at my apartment complex still sing at night, which unsettles me. Also unsettling is how the wind blows stronger and colder and all at once; feeling the chill of it, and hearing the roar of it in distant trees, and looking up to see the rapid shifting of silver clouds overhead, I felt like the friendly comfort of being outside on a beautiful day had been replaced by an unpredictable and uncomfortable smallness. It was very late on a Thursday night, the robins were trumpeting their hearts out in the artificial lighting of the parking lot, and my roommate and I were going to go play pickleball.  When Woolf takes a night walk, she pretends she is buying a pencil. My roommate and I are both too busy to do things together except late on Thursday nights, so we really were going to play pickleball. We passed by the complex where we had made snow angels at the start of the first big snowstorm, where I’d dropped my phone with all my cards and by the time I realized thirty minutes l...

     In Open City, Julius’s constant walking produces both moments of good insight and moral blindness, revealing the limits of observation. At times, his wandering allows him to understand and see what others overlook, like where the city’s surface gives way to buried histories of slavery and tragedy. Here, walking becomes a tool for uncovering layered meanings and connecting his present day environment in New York to his cultural suppressed pasts. However, this same detached and observational mode leads to moral complexity in his interactions with people in his life, especially with Moji. When she confronts him about a past assault, instead of responding with accountability or empathy, Julius just  leaves without saying anything or providing any closure. He evades responsibility , repressing his emotions and his truth, neither of which he provides the reader. This contrast shows that while walking can expand perception, it doesn't ensure a reliable awareness becaus...

In our discussion today we talked about every night walking poem to some extent which was extremely interesting to me. Night walking reshapes perception by making spaces feel uncertain and 'uncanny', especially through the tension between exposure and enclosure. In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting,” darkness allows the narrator to lose her daytime identity and move anonymously through the city. This makes a paradox, she is physically exposed in public streets, but psychologically enclosed within her own shifting thoughts and stories. The night enables freedom, strangers and shop windows become narratives, and authority is  destabilized . Her voice becomes fluid and exploratory. In Robert Frost’s “ Acquainted with the Night, ”  which was my groups poem to dissect, darkness intensifies both exposure and enclosure in a more isolating way. The intensity builds through the poem, and there's a sense of submerged impropriety  of Frost. Frost is exposed in empty, open str...