Monday, March 20, 2017

Wandering


























"It is that, in wandering purposelessly through the streets rather than pursuing a direct, purposeful path through them, he (the speaker) resists the commercial organization of the city.  'Improvement makes strait roads', Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell at the beginning of the 1790s, 'but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius'...

'I wander thro' each charter'd street.'  Something that is chartered is mapped and measured as well as licensed.  Someone who wanders, inscribing him- or herself on the city, scribbles over these ordered, logical lines."


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