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 year is ending, and I’m walking uphill again. I cross the square under a low, cloudy sky and stroll up Green Street, then turn onto Chicago Avenue, thinking that it’s the last time I will write this column, remembering why I started. There were several reasons. I’d never written to deadlines before, and I thought the obligation of weekly writing would provide an interesting discipline. I love walking in the Friendly City, and I felt that people should be aware of what a wonderful place this is to walk, as well as the times when it’s not so wonderful (disappearing sidewalks, truncated paths). I wanted to share this experience in all its random, quirky, astonishing ordinariness. To uncover the marvelous in the everyday. To trace the seasons, exploring the shifts in weather throughout the year. To capture, if I could, the texture of a place.
A collection of furniture stands in a yard; someone must be moving. The mirror of a bureau reflects the sky, this stern winter sky in which the clouds have thickened, while a ray of white sunlight pierces the blue darkness, flooding the housefronts. Only in winter, I think, is the sky at once so dark and so bright. I have to turn away from the mirror in the yard when it catches the dazzling sun. The effect feels almost deliberate, as if this sidewalk tableau is an art installation, and I think of one of my inspirations for this column, the surrealist writer Louis Aragon, whose book Paris Peasant, written a hundred years ago, records his ecstatic experiences of urban wandering. I shared Aragon’s desire for a sense of enchantment with common scenes. Like him, I wished to cultivate a heightened awareness that could draw the force of myth from familiar objects. There’s an intense kind of noticing, at which Aragon excelled, that reveals one’s surroundings as a fathomless reservoir of strangeness and delight.
The Friendly City isn’t Paris, but it’s definitely surreal, I think to myself, walking up Greystone Street, observing another artwork, an intentional one this time, the type our city provides regularly, free of charge, for the entertainment of passersby: a fantastical display of lawn ornaments. Two smartly dressed foxes, seated on a bench, enjoy a picnic lunch. A little dog peers into a birdbath. Minnie Mouse lurks behind a tree. A patient donkey stands hitched to a cart that bears a cascade of living foliage. A happy chaos reigns among these figures, as in dreams; realistic portrayals and relations are abandoned; the white doves crookedly kissing above a garland of painted roses are bigger than the foxes, while Minnie Mouse looms above a chipped blue squirrel. Temporal order is no more respected than spatial proportion: popular and classical images blend in this peaceable kingdom, where a stone merchild with the blank eyes of Greek statuary plays a conch for an audience of two cows, a bonneted Victorian figurine, and a brontosaurus.
When I began to write about walking, I wanted to record the charm of these things, both the small ones and the large: the planter shaped like a boot on Smith Avenue, the houses built up on the hillside with their balconies overlooking the town, and the mountains, always the mountains, now aglow beneath lifting clouds, the shadows on their flanks electric blue, suffused with color like stained glass. I hoped to develop the sensibility of a poet, as described by Ralph Waldo Emerson, another model of the walking writer. “[T]he poet’s habit of living,” Emerson wrote, “should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.”
To be like Emerson’s poet, thrilled with little things. A Christmas wreath. A dead-end street giving onto a secret path where a walker can slip through. Crossing the road, I think of the writer Lydia Davis, whose conversation with her friend, the Norwegian writer Johanne Fronth-Nygren, inspired both this column and a change in my life. These two writers discussed their decision to stop flying as part of a response to the climate crisis. I was struck by their candid reflections on what they were losing by making this choice, but also by their sense of gain and discovery. For Davis, deciding not to fly “results in a greater concentration on the local, on valuing what is here. Once I am not expecting more and more, looking outward farther and farther, a circle is drawn around what I have, but within that circle there is more attention, I look deeper inside the circle, and what remains has greater value.” I’ve traveled a great deal in my life, and trips to distant places have often energized my writing, so for me the decision not to fly meant reinventing myself as a writer, envisioning a new approach to both art and life. Writing this column was part of my attempt to look, as Davis puts it, “deeper inside the circle,” to recognize and value what is here.
A hedge of winterberry holly sparkles along the wall of a church, the scarlet berries like jewels in a brittle brown net. A clump of silver grass turns incandescent in the sun, going up like a struck match in tufts of whitish flame. The habit of attention has proved more powerful than I expected; I don’t think I’ve fully understood its influence yet. I only know how lovely the city is in every season. I think of the writer Robert Walser, yet another source of inspiration for these notes, and a character in his novel The Tanners, who remarks that the trees don’t travel, so why should he? The trees change without moving. “When I find myself in a city in winter, I feel tempted to see it in spring,” this character explains. “Seeing a tree in winter I wish to see it resplendent in the springtime, sending out its first enchanting leaves.”
Seeing these trees in winter, I want to see them in the spring. I feel I will never exhaust this little city. How much I failed to record, after all, during the course of the year—how many scenes, corners, curiosities, and dramas of weather and light! “However closely we approach the everyday,” wrote Aragon, “it can never be close enough.” I wrote every week, but I wanted to say this every minute: that the blue of the sky behind the neighbor’s roof was darker than usual this morning; that the creek ran high; that the gold-painted statue in Court Square looked warm against the lighted café; that this was our town, and we loved it; that this was our time, and we lived it; that we were here, just here, and we were alive.
With thanks to Andrew Jenner, Bridget Manley, and the team at The Citizen
