Sidewalks

"“One does not find solitude, one makes it,” writes Duras. Flipping through the pages of Écrire, that’s the first phrase I find underlined. I can still catch an echo of its original intensity, but I’d be lying if I said I knew why it was that phrase, and not some other, that struck me so forcefully at the start of the long train journey back to Mumbai. I probably understood something for the first time, but have now forgotten what. I probably found words for something that I’d long been trying to articulate and that ceased to matter once I’d found those words." (Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks)

"Spaces survive the passage of time in the same way a person survives his death: in the close alliance between the memory and the imagination that others forge around it. They exist as long as we keep thinking of them, imagining in them; as long as we remember them, remember ourselves there, and, above all, as long as we remember what we imagined in them. A relingo—an emptiness, an absence—is a sort of depository for possibilities, a place that can be seized by the imagination and inhabited by our phantom-follies. Cities need those vacant lots, those silent gaps where the mind can wander freely." (Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks)

"But in spite of these riders who prize the utility of two wheels above its art, riding a bicycle is one of the few street activities that can still be thought of as an end in itself. The person who distinguishes himself from that purposeful crowd by conceiving it as such should be called a cycleur. And that person—who has discovered cycling to be an occupation with no interest in ultimate outcomes—knows he possesses a strange freedom that can only be compared with that of thinking or writing." (Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks)

"The urban walker has to march to the rhythm of the city in which he finds himself and demonstrate the same single-minded purpose as other pedestrians. Any modulation of his pace makes him the object of suspicion. The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or—even worse—might be a tourist. Except for those who still take their dogs for a walk, children coming home from school, the very old, or itinerant street vendors, no one in the city has the right to slow, aimless walking." (Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks)

"There was no portrait on Brodsky’s gravestone. It seemed appropriate that that definitive stamp of identity was not there; the smooth, opaque gray of the stone was more honest—a reflection of the anonymity of a hotel-mensch par excellence, a man of many hotel rooms, many mirrors, many faces. Better to stand by the grave and try to remember some photo of him sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, or bring to mind one of those recordings of his voice, at once powerful but broken, like that of someone who has passed many hours in solitude and acquired conviction through constant doubt." (Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks)