Stilgoe - Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places

"Outside Lies Magic... is an eye-opening journey into the development of our civilization. It is a human version of the Origin of the Species and [Stilgoe] is the Charles Darwin of real estate, utility and transportation development substituting the nations back yard for the Galapagos Islands." Rocky Mountain News

"Stilgoe calls this a 'straightforward guidebook to exploring whose purpose borders on the evangelical, but it's the sort of book that makes the reader want to buttonhole anyone handy and say, 'Listen to this.' " Publishers Weekly

"Anyone who reads this book will inevitably view the interstate service station, electric wires, the rural mailbox, even lawns and pigeons with a new perspective. Seeing the world around you, rather than floating through it like a robot, alerts the eye, jolts the brainand challenges society. It's ambitious and rewarding. It's fun." BookPage

"With the zeal of many a guru attuned to the vexing complexities of life, Stilgoe celebrates the ordinary with gusto. He holds up to the bright light of discovery seemingly mundane aspects of social interaction, technology and the built environment. He prowls alleys, abandoned railroad tracks, the forested fringe surrounding gated communities, the mail carrier's evolving routeand finds meaning in them all." The San Diego Union-Tribune

"John R. Stilgoe aims to turn readers into explorers, leading them behind commercial strips, along drainage ditches, across power-line right-of-ways, and through torn chain-link fences. [Outside Lies Magic] treats these margins of life, places we are used to ignoring or abhorring, as essential material for the understanding of how the apparatus of new technologies has ordered our physical environment.... Exploring offers a solution: the more we wander places that are supposedly off-limits,' the more we recover them for public use." Architectural Record

"John Stilgoe, the Audubon of the built landscape, has noticed thousands of things that the rest of us have, literally, overlooked. This wonderful book will make a noticer out of you, tooan explorer of the mysteries to be found in every corner of this nation." BILL MCKIBBEN

"Calling this creative book Inspirational' is no mere trite praise: it will certainly motivate its readers to start moving, looking, thinking, and connecting." Booklist

"Stilgoe, an unsentimental and intrepid explorer, has written a little Baedeker of ordinary America that informs, charms, and saddens, all at the same time. WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, author of City Life

"Stilgoe takes us on an exhilarating, mindful journey of our personal and environmental landscapes."
ELLEN LANGER, author of Mindfulness and ThePower of Mindful Learning

''[Outside Lies Magic] is a brilliant little lifestyle treatisea handbookon how to make your life more exciting here in the waning moments of the 20th century by learning to explore. Real exploration. Exploration that's available to everyone, at no cost, no risk." ForeWord

Outside Lies
Magic

Regaining History
and Awareness in
Everyday Places

JohnR.Stilgoe

Contents

MANY PEOPLE HELPED with the exploring behind this book. I thank Thomas Armstrong, Robert Belyea, Gerard Buckley, Neil Connolly, James Fitzgerald, John Fox, Henry Goldman, Amanda Keidan, Thomas Lembong, Eleanor Norris, Barney Schauble, Catherine Steindler, and Harold Tuttle. My editor, George Gibson, deserves special thanks for his encouragement and insight. And as always I thank my sons, Adam and Nathaniel, and above all my wife, Debra, whose unfailing support and energy make even the steepest hills fun.

GET OUT NOW. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our century. Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. Forget about blood pressure and arthritis, cardiovascular rejuvenation and weight reduction. Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore.

Abandon, even momentarily, the sleek modern technology that consumes so much time and money now, and seek out the resting place of a technology almost forgotten. Go outside and walk a bit, long enough to forget programming, long enough to take in and record new surroundings.

Flex the mind, a little at first, then a lot. Savor something special. Enjoy the best-kept secret aroundthe ordinary, everyday landscape that rewards any explorer, that touches any explorer with magic.

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor craftedall of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.

MORE THAN TWENTY years ago, I began teaching the art of exploration at Harvard University, and I have been at it ever since. My courses and the books I have written focus on particular subjectsthe creation of a national landscape as the treasure common to all citizens, the seacoast built environment, the suburban landscape after 1820, the ways modernization reshapes traditional spaces, among othersbut the real focus of all my teaching is the necessity to get out and look around, to see acutely, to notice, to make connections.

Late in the 1980s I stopped distributing schedules of lectures. On the first day of class I introduce each course, show slides that outline the subject matter, hand out a reading list and examination schedule, and speak a bit about the sequence of topics. But I refuse to provide a schedule of topics. Undergraduate and graduate students alike love schedules, love knowing the order of subjects and the satisfaction of ticking off one line after another, class after class, week after week. 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.. They like knowing the halfway point, the near end. I assure them that examinations will occur on given dates, that the term paper is due on the day I announce on the course information sheet, but then I explain that the lack of a topic schedule encourages all of us to explore a bit, to answer questions that arise in class or office hours, to follow leads we discover while studying something else. Each of the courses, I explain patiently, really concerns exploration, and exploration happens best by accident, by letting way lead on to way, not by following a schedule down a track.