Some of our workshop attendees told us that they had always lived in cities and we should pay more attention to this, and so we listened. In this session we looked at three brilliant texts that capture some of the experiences of the built environment and how people move around the streets.
Virginia’s Woolf’s brilliantly observant essay ‘Street Haunting’ was our starting point. It begins with the brilliant line: ‘No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, a purpose, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.’ Later on in the essay she explores how we can be freed from our memories and expectations of others by walking the streets anonymously. She writes:
‘But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured.’
We talked together about our own memories of wandering in cities, whether familiar or when traveling and it was a brilliant conversation. You can read the Woolf essay in full here.
Our next text was a poem by Denise Levertov, called ‘February Evening in New York’ and we thought about her childhood in London and then her adoption of the US as home. We loved her description of how she watches ‘autonomous feet pattern the streets in hurry and stroll’ and catches snatches of overheard conversations as she walks. The poem is here.
The poet Carl Sandberg was our last choice, and we looked at a selection of verses from just one of his poems about his city, Chicago. The central idea he explores in this one, ‘Skyscraper‘ is that buildings carry memories of all those who built them and who work or live in them. This opened up so many reflections in the group about places we have lived.
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