By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
The other day I was walking along College Avenue, a neighborhood I know well in all its seasons, when a perfectly unfamiliar house suddenly loomed up on one side of the street.
A two-story brick house with white trim, shadowed by an oak. A simple, sturdy structure, built in the foursquare American Craftsman style so popular in the Friendly City, with the porch and tin roof one sees everywhere. Is this why I’d never noticed it? White pillars. Damp-looking concrete steps tinted with lichen. A round table on the porch. A chair with flowered cushions.
I paused and stared, arrested by a particular variety of shock: the jolt of an interruption.
To discover newness in a well-known place, I’ve said before, you can observe how it changes over time or seek out unexplored paths. But there’s a third form of newness, much weirder, perhaps impossible to fully control. Familiarity itself can trick you. All at once, strolling carelessly down a street where you think you know every crack in the sidewalk, you can be ambushed by the sight of a strange door, an alien building, even an entire alley that’s never caught your attention.
This feeling doesn’t occur when you visit a place. You have to live there. On a visit, everything is too new to provide the required contrast. It takes repeated exposure to build up a layer of the known, of the everyday, a fabric that can be rent.
There’s a wonderful story by the Belgian writer Jean Ray called “The Shadowy Street,” first published in 1931. In this chilling tale, a schoolteacher discovers a street called Saint Beregonne’s Lane, which no one else can see. It takes the teacher a few seconds to cross the entrance to this lane, which opens between a distillery and a seed merchant’s shop, but other people step instantly between the two businesses, insisting they are separated only by a wall. The teacher is startled by this mystery, for he can clearly see the poorly whitewashed walls of the street, its worn, greenish pavement, the sickly viburnum bush sprouting between two doors, and the sign reading Saint Beregonne’s Lane. “I concluded that, for everyone in the world except myself, that street existed outside of time and space.”
I think of Saint Beregonne’s Lane when a house of almond pallor suddenly springs up fully formed on Stuart Street, where I have walked countless times without observing its two front windows, one divided vertically and the other horizontally, or the door painted a creamy beige, slightly darker than the siding, or the two pickup trucks parked in the driveway. I’m confident that this house doesn’t really belong to the secret world of Jean Ray, which turns out to be inhabited by invisible monsters, but the sight of it gives me an eerie yet pleasurable feeling reminiscent of his tale of impossible geography. It’s the shadowy street! I think to myself when, on one of my night walks, Water Street buckles freakishly to accommodate a long, yellowish building, a featureless monolith with opaque windows, gloomy and institutional like an office block in a 1970s TV show, whose presence seems to me totally unaccountable. Where did it come from? What is it for? How can such a large structure have materialized out of nowhere? The shadowy street is pressing against the everyday world, cracking its surface, exposing the red and blue neon stripes of the vape shop and, in the deserted music equipment store, the filing cabinets piercingly illuminated by a nightlamp.
A life spent constantly traveling to new places would be deprived of this cunning species of surprise. It’s a sensation that always thrills me, because it demonstrates how my brain works, offering something like a window into my own consciousness. How many things the deft, efficient brain skips over in the course of the day! Rooftops my eyes glide over without registering their presence. Scraps of conversation, overheard and immediately deleted. Words read and forgotten in the pursuit of knowledge.
How could I have missed the extravagantly dilapidated shed behind that house, collapsed into a pile of chipped red planks? And the palatial structure rising up from Wolfe Street in the twilight, its windowed galleries etched on the misty sky, elegant and frail as the ghost of some Victorian hotel—is that really the bottle factory?
The world is brimming with stuff I don’t need. An unfathomable reservoir of neglected impressions enfolds me. To glimpse the shadowy street is to peer for a moment into those depths, which, for the practical purposes of my daily life, might as well exist outside of time and space. Maybe Jean Ray was right to represent its darkness as terror, for what would life be like if you noticed every single thing? That level of attention might well be unbearable. But in small doses, these flashes of awareness produce a double wonder: amazement at my own capacity to ignore my surroundings, and at the richness of the world.
