On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page B

ring and who had agreed to meet me in as much time. Bespectacled, he was dressed comfortably for a stroll, in layers under a light jacket, his voluminous gray hair curling out from underneath a baseball cap. He epitomized the rumpled, unpretentious, slightly distracted scientist of childhood books and my imagination.
    Don’t be fooled, though, by the casual cap and easy manner: Horenstein is a man who knows vastly more about the past, oh, four hundred million years of the city than you do, and is about to gently let you in on how little you know. He began introducing me to his enthusiasms gradually. As we left the building, before officially setting out on our walk, I made an offhand comment about the paving stones underfoot in the vestibule to the museum, assuming that asphalt would be less interesting to him than a “pure” rock or stone. He glanced at me from under his cap and grinned.
    “Well the thing is, there are only two things on the earth: minerals and biomass [plants or animals]. Everything that we have got here has to be natural to begin with—so asphalt is one of those things.”
    After all, asphalt pavement is a mix of a viscous residue from petroleum, with mineral aggregate thrown in—that is, just rocks, sand, and sticky stuff. Such a concoction is “pure”; it is even recycled. To Horenstein, the buckling of the stones revealed something of the natural topography of the earth underneath. Thenhe pointed out how even the shape of the paving stones alluded to a natural phenomenon. Hexagonal, they were modeled after the stones used in the long, straight ancient Roman roads. These were made up of basalt in the surprising six-sided shape that naturally forms when lava cools and shrinks. 1 Back in our vestibule, we did not need to move an inch to see geology in the city: it is just exactly where you are now.
    What an epiphany to reconceive a city—which feels just like a jumble of man-made objects—this Horensteinian way. When we think about geology, we think about what is underfoot. But Horenstein maintains, yes, it is what is under us—but it is also what surrounds us: we are inside of the geology of the city.
    “What I see, ” he said, gesturing at the museum and its moat-like landscaping around it, “is this: this [building] is a big giant rock outcropping, and this is a grassy plain in front of it, with scattered trees.”
    In other words, an ersatz natural landscape writ small—mountain and steppe—repeated a dozen times on every single block. Each building is, of course, forged of stone or hewed from a once-living tree. So-called man-made objects are just those that began as naturally occurring materials and are broken apart and recombined to form something customized to our purposes.
    Viewed with this lens, the city feels less artificial. The cold stone is natural, almost living : it absorbs water, warms under the sun, and sloughs its skin in rain. Like us, stone is affected by time, its outer layer softened and its veins made more prominent. And viewed as a natural landscape, the city feels less permanent: even the strongest-looking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persistent, patient forces of wind,water, and time. Weather continuously wears at the building, carving its influence by subtraction. Dirt stains; rainwater leaves a trail of salt tearing from a sill to the ground; a decorative copper touch oxidizes—and then its greenness washes onto the stone below it; steel rusts earthly red. Little is as convincing of the naturalness of the city as the process of weathering. Stones become covered with moss; ivy creeps up, disjoints, and eventually obliterates brick; wood darkens with moisture and lightens with age, then gets worn into a soft-cornered version of its former self. Eventually, this town—all towns—will dissolve and become fodder for another generation’s construction.
    Together we climbed up a few marble stairs out of the museum. Each step