The Art of Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes

"How we spend our days,'' Annie Dillard wrote in her timelessly beautiful meditation on presence over productivity, is, of course, how we spend our lives. And nowhere do we fail at the art of presence most miserably and most tragically than in urban life -- in the city, high on the cult of productivity, where we float past each other, past the buildings and trees and the little boy in the purple pants, past life itself, cut off from the breathing of the world by iPhone earbuds and solipsism. 

And yet: 'The art of seeing has to be learned,' Marguerite Duras reverberates -- and it can be learned, as cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz invites us to believe in her breathlessly wonderful On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (public library) -- a record of her quest to walk around a city block with eleven different 'experts,' from an artist to a geologist to a dog, and emerge with fresh eyes mesmerized by the previously unseen fascinations of a familiar world. 

Maria Popova shares more in this in-depth exploration of Horowitz's book.

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