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My husband is reading Walter Benjamin's Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schocken, 1978), and last night, he read aloud to me this wonderful passage from "One-Way Street":

"The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcipt a key to China's enigmas" (66).

So--this seems to me, first, a possible way into the learning practices of our Chinese students, which we might well attend to..."reading" that follows the movement of the reader's mind (which we have been valorizing as interactive) might well prevent the reader from really carefully attending to the contours of what is read, from having her soul "commanded" by the text.

Second, it's a wonderful riff on the pair of essays I used last year, when Carman Papalia led my Ecological Imaginings students on a "blind field shuttle": Michel de Certeau's Walking In the City, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), and Paplia's riff on that, Caning the City, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry 1, 2 (June 2007); I'm hoping we can still find a place for these in our "Play in the City" course, as we invite students to compare how the city looks (for example) from the top of Comcast Center with what they can see from the level of the street.

(one of Ava Blitz's aerial photographs....)