through the streets of cities

«Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body lying in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets, your body laboring up hills and mountains, your body sitting down in chairs, lying down on beds, stretching out on beaches, cycling down country roads, walking through forests, pastures, and deserts, running on cinder tracks, jumping up and down on hardwood floors, standing in showers, stepping into warm baths, sitting on toilets, waiting in airports and train stations, riding up and down in elevators, squirming in the seats of cars and buses, walking through rainstorms without an umbrella, sitting in classrooms, browsing in bookstores and record shops (R.I.P.), sitting in auditoriums, movie theaters, and concert halls, dancing with girls in school gymnasiums, paddling canoes in rivers, rowing boats across lakes, eating at kitchen tables, eating at dining room tables, eating in restaurants, shopping in department stores, appliance stores, furniture stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, and clothing stores, standing in line for passports and driver’s licenses, leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up ondesks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat, entering synagogues and churches, dressing and undressing in bedrooms, hotel rooms, and locker rooms, standing on escalators, lying in hospital beds, sitting on doctors’ examination tables, sitting in barbers’ chairs and dentists’ chairs, doing somersaults on the grass, standing on your head on the grass, jumping into swimming pools, walking slowly through museums, dribbling basketballs in playgrounds, throwing baseballs and footballs in public parks, feeling the different sensations of walking on wooden floors, cement floors, tile floors, and stone floors, the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.»

Paul Auster, Winter Journal