On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz

were worn and one leg was buckled, it had the look of former elegance: clean lines, no surfeit of frilliness, a proud back. Under our gaze it seemed for a moment to turn elegant again, lightening my heart burdened with the thought that it was now simply trash, unattended by side chairs and a coffee-table manservant.
    We walked along, carrying the sofa with us in Kalman’s camera, where it would join her collection of photos of spent and discarded chairs and sofas.
    “Once you start looking,” she advised, “they are everywhere.”
    We had thrust ourselves off the corner. The real magic of the walk happened then, when we stopped standing there and began to actually amble. With Kalman, walking around the block entered a fourth dimension.
    Of course, I—and each of my fellow walkers—had been in four dimensions all along. Still, the progression of the walks was decidedly three-dimensional: always up, down, and along sidewalks. Except when disabused of this notion by my son, I had defined each walk as a straightforward journey along a path between two points, A and B, the beginning of the walk and itsend. What we manipulated was the time it took to cover that path: many of my co-walkers had slowed down to look more carefully at something underfoot or overhead. Occasionally we sped up to catch a glimpse in a store window before a shutter was pulled down, or we briefly galloped, as though someone were lighting a match to our tailcoats, to avoid becoming a pedestrian-automobile accident statistic.
    But with Kalman, the definition of the space changed. She walked straight off of the sidewalks. I don’t mean she floated, in her blue canvas sneakers, hovering inches off the ground. (Though the image suits her, and matches many of her charismatic drawings that pose the subject, be it a pleated skirt or a robin, frameless on the page.) No, Kalman climbed not a tree. Instead, she veered. She abandoned the course. She left the route and wandered into buildings that interested her. Over the course of five blocks and two hours, we went off course a half dozen times. We knocked on the door of the local halfway house. We meandered into a church. We descended into a basement senior center that advertised itself as being specifically for “black social workers.” We made it into the anterooms of an odd small museum of Russian art and a Buddhist temple, only stymied by ongoing renovations in each. Eventually, we made it from A to B, but not before visiting all of the later letters of the alphabet.
    Beyond this, she implicated others in our walk. We spoke to a mailman, various policemen, a couple of movers, numerous passersby who Kalman for unknown reasons thought might be able to tell us the name of the man featured in a horribly done plaster bust set in a first-floor window, folks working at the halfway house and senior centers, people entering and leaving the church, people who had simply stopped in their walking (for reasons of infirmity or tourism) somewhere near where we had stopped, and an office worker and two cooks doing work behind windowsopen just enough for Kalman to call in to them and for them to acknowledge us.
    Kalman’s boldness was matched by my admitted discomfort. I try, as an accredited city resident, to manage coexistence with millions of strangers by keeping pretty much to myself on the street. I had not spoken to this many people on the street in my last hundred ventures from my house. Kalman forced me, reluctantly, to remove my invisibility cloak and read the social-workers sign as though it were really inviting us in. Her frank interest in others made me think about the feeling of privacy we carry with us from our homes into public, where there is truly no privacy. I had not noticed, until forced to by Kalman’s sociability, how I was engaging in a fundamentally social activity by walking out in public.
    Still, we all have a sense of the “appropriate” personal space around us—a kind of zone of privacy that