Wonder

"You always remember your first time.

The first time you achieve a dream.
The first time you find a place that truly inspires you."
-http://spaceistoimagination.blogspot.com/

 

In London, there is inspiration on every corner. The people, the sights, the tourists, the history. I could walk the streets of London for years and not grow tired of it. The old structures mixed with new buildings. The people, wearing black, or grey, or navy, or tan, or white, or neon. Speaking English, French, German, Chinese, Spanish. A million languages I've never heard. Like André in Nadja, I could "unconsciously [watch] their faces, their clothes, their way of walking" (Breton 64). They are both fascinating and meaningless to me.

I walk from Tottenham Court Road station down Charing Cross, past Leicester Square, all the way down to Trafalgar Square. Sometimes I turn right and walk through the Mall, into St. James' if the weather is nice. It rarely is. 

More often I move down Whitehall past the Horse Guards Palace toward Westminster. I stand beneath the cathedral for a few minutes before I am standing outside of Parliament, under Big Ben. It's not called Big Ben anymore, but that changes nothing, really. I walk east along the River Thames towards Embankment, and cross at the Waterloo Bridge. I walk west on the South Bank, where the theatre is, and past the pub made from old sets, and through the gaggles of pickpockets, and under the Eye until I am directly across from Parliament.

At first, I have to think just about where I am going, how to get there, how to get home. Soon it is my usual haunt. When I leave the flat, I find my feet walking this path without my telling them to. I can walk there without thinking, except that the whole time I am thinking. Contemplating the history of it, the future of it, the present reaof it.