‘Get out now” are the first three words of Outside Lies Magic, a book published almost 20 years ago by the Harvard academic John Stilgoe, but that feels more necessary than ever, in these mean-minded days of Trump and Brexit and trolling and shrivelling attention spans. It’s common enough advice: we’re always being told to exercise more and sit less, to go running to combat depression, to head to the hills for a mental-health boost. But such activities leave Stilgoe aghast. “Do not jog,” he writes. “Do not run. Forget about blood pressure.” Nor is he urging travel to wild, awe-inspiring locations. Outside Lies Magic is about the ordinary outdoors: the fire hydrants, telegraph poles, electrical substations and scratty verges outside your door right now. (I found it via Austin Kleon’s excellent email newsletter at austinkleon.com.) It’s about “probing and poking at ordinary space”. Stilgoe thinks we’ve forgotten how to notice – and need “formal education in just going for a walk”.
In one obvious sense, you’ll miss the magic of outside if you spend all weekend watching Netflix or glued to your phone, reinforcing the sad notion that excitement is always somewhere you’re not. But, in a less obvious sense, many outdoor pursuits miss that magic, too. Training for a marathon, cycling to work or counting your steps with a fitness tracker, you’re using the environment for your own ends, noticing only what’s needed to fulfil your predetermined goal. In his courses on “the art of exploration”, Stilgoe appals hard-charging Ivy Leaguers by refusing to distribute a schedule: “Confronted by a professor who explains that schedules produce a desire, sometimes an obsession, to ‘get through the material’, they grow uneasy. They like to get through the material.”
Instead, he wants them to let the material get to them. Look closely, and peel back layers of a city’s history by inspecting the worn paint on shop fronts, the footprints of former railway lines. There’s a whole chapter on the meaning of fences. “The built environment is… a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off and another one applied”, but where you can make out the older traces.
Stilgoe rails against our “programmed electronic age”, but his real message isn’t anti-tech. I’m not sure it’s even mainly about the outdoors. It’s about the frame of mind in which we look, and being willing to let attention be led by our surroundings. There’s a subversive power in this, he notes, because it disrupts the self-interested narratives with which others – politicians, corporations – want us to interpret the world. Just pay attention, he writes: “To everything that abuts the rural road, the city, the street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter.” (Today, this would probably be called “being mindful”; Stilgoe mercifully avoids that phrase.) Soon, you’ll start to feel restless, and wonder what the point of it is. But the sauntering is the point. Not succumbing to the message that everything has to have a point is the point.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
