„Even if I am only in a place for a
short while I quickly build up a routine: I want not just to visit a
city but to inhabit it as
rapidly as possible.“
„We are always
taking the same routes through cities. The tube or the metro forces
us to do this, and so – less claustrophobically – do buses. Even
on a bike, when we can take any route, we allow ourselves to get
funneled along familiar paths, preferring the often slightly longer
but nicer cycle lanes because they are ostensibly safer, even though
they can actually be more dangerous because one is in a state of less
than heightened alert. As pedestrians, too, we not only stick to the
same routes, but prefer to cling to the same side of the road.“
„We
tend always to approach a given place from the same direction, via
the same route. I am always surprised how thoroughly disorientating
it is if I arrange to meet someone at a café I know well but, for
whatever reason – an earlier appointment somewhere else – end up
approaching it from an unusual direction. It's completely
bewildering. As if the place we are supposed to be meeting at has
disappeared. What's happened to it? Psychlogically, the location of a
place is not fixed. It is determined not by where
it is but how we get to it.“
„But even if
nothing changes, even if the place and the food and the staff remain
unchanged, there is still no going back, even though, of course, one
does exactly that: one goes back.“
„Nietzsche loved
what he called 'brief habits', but he so hated 'enduring habits' that
he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that
caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit (though most
intolerable of all, he went on, would be 'a life entirely devoid of
habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation.“
Inhabiting,
Restless Cities, Geoff Dyer
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