Free On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz

inscriptions. In New York, he has taught calligraphy and typography at Parson’s School of Design for over two decades and has stalked Helvetica (and the various non-Helveticas) in the subway system. This malady, this literaphilia, makes one seek, and see, letters. In a city, letters are everywhere.
    One trouble with being human—with the human condition—is that, as with many conditions, you cannot turn it off. Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world. And our world is a linguistic one, fashioned in and then described with language.
    Early in life, an infant will make certain noises that have special resonance to parents. The varieties of cries, from fussy to outraged, are matched by the round warm coos of satisfaction. The infant vacillates between being a catastrophist and a purring kitten. Soon, though, nearly regardless of what his parents do, as long as they talk around him, that infant will start making different sounds. These hums, burbles, and yammers will be the sounds that make up the language or languages he hears floating above his head. His young brain magically distinguishes the parents’ language from the hums, roars, and crashes of nonlanguage sounds in the world.
    For the first five years of life, it is said, children learn approximately one word every two hours they are awake. This fact is intended to impress, and it does. From an adult’s vantage, the prodigiousnessof the infant mind is enviable (even though we have all had that mind). Most of us struggle to remember that new, curious word we read just this morning in the newspaper. In theory, I would like my brain to sponge up words like an infant’s does, but in reality, I also find the child’s progress terrifying. Every hour, children are losing more and more ability to think without language—and without the cultural knowledge that language passes along. Every hour, children are less able to not notice words. And to me, the lack of language is what is enviable.
    Don’t get me wrong: I am appreciative of the language that allows me to write that I am appreciative of language. I love, covet, and collect words—silly words and finely formed words and words I’ll never use but just feel glad to know. My husband and I own hundreds of dictionaries, whose main roles in our lives are first, to wait uncomplaining until they are thumbed through by us, and second, to then offer up such masterpieces of grace and charm as omphalos, amanuensis, and picklesome .
    Few of these words, though, will I encounter in an ordinary day. By contrast, every day, when walking in a city, driving along a highway, or existing anyplace but deep wilderness, we are beset by dull, tedious words. Signs and storefronts and billboards and computer screens barrage us with text that we, with our language-besotted minds, cannot help but read. As I write this, I hesitantly peek out my office window, and, without my willing it, my eyes track quickly and inevitably to the text on the side of a taxi: NYC TAXI , it reads. $2.50 INITIAL FARE. On its roof, an advertising billboard commands, BE STUPID . As the taxi passes, a stenciled POST NO BILLS is discernible on the scaffolding hulking over the sidewalk. Words are the ample cleavage of the urban environment: impossible not to look at.
    Worse still, every city is dense with surfaces, and at some point in human history someone discovered that surfaces are great placesto put words and other symbols. Ancient Egypt slaveowners plastered walls with papyrus posters offering a reward for the return of runaway vassals. Greek and Roman merchants placed symbolic signs—a wooden shoe; a stone soup pot—above the doorways of their shops. And the ruins of Pompeii, which in its ashen burial preserved a day in the life of AD 76, has walls covered with notices and inscriptions for real estate (“To rent from the first day of