Texts

Leurs trois visages halés, plus foncés que les cheveux, se ressemblent. L’expression en est la même: sérieuse, réfléchie, préoccupée peut-être. Leurs traits aussi sont identiques, bien que, visiblement, deux de ces enfants sont des garçons et le troisième une fille. [...] Mais le costume est tout à fait la même: culotte courte et chemisette, l’une et l’autre en grosse toile d’un bleu délavé.

La Plage Alain Robbe-Grillet

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It’s a mouth, half open, breathing, but the eyes, nose, and chin are no longer there…. the noise – the breathing  – is tremendous, but above all its that you don’t expect it: you climb up the dune, you struggle to drag your feet up the slope,  for a while all you’re concerned with is the suction beneath the sand, and suddenly space explodes, you’ve looked up and the top of the dune has fallen away far below you, something like two colossal arms opening wide – but that’s not it exactly, it’s not welcoming, its rather that you have no choice, the way you’d fall off a building or a monument without a guardrail….

…you can tell from people’s faces, especially children’s, who has seen the sea and who has not: those who must have welcomed the sweep of the sea into their eyes (crashing all the way to the backs of their skulls, it empties them out in a way), and those who have tried , confusing the sea and infinity, to keep adding a little bit more to the images, telling themselves that even beyond, still further, without end, the sea goes on… when it’s not that at all, when compared to galaxies, the sea is minuscule.

Breathing Underwater Marie Darrieussecq

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Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker.  They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road as introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story.  Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent.  Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there….

…the story is a map, the landscape a narrative.

Wanderlust. A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit

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