“In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.”

“Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”

“The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.' The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the large territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.”

“Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.”

“Walking . . . is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

“In those moments of moving through the streets with people who share one's beliefs comes the rare and magical possibility of a kind of populist communion...At such times it is as though the still small pool of one's own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge. These moments when individuals find others who share their dreams, when fear is overwhelmed by idealism or by outrage, when people feel a strength that surprises them, are moments in which they become heroes—for what are heroes but those so motivated by ideals that fear cannot sway them, those who speak for us, those who have power for good? A person who never feels it is condemned to cynicism and isolation. In those moments everyone becomes a visionary, everyone becomes a hero.”

“Reading these stories, it's tempting to think thatthe arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting,navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in theeveryday world of the present, an anxiety to survivemanifests itself in cars and clothes for far more ruggedoccasions than those at hand, as though to express somesense of the toughness of things and of readiness to facethem. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival,seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's calledfor is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness todeal with what comes next. These captives lay out in astark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: thetransitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldomis it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something ofthis journey between the near and the far goes on inevery life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend,an old letter will remind you that you are not who youonce were, for the person who dwelt among them, valuedthis, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Withoutnoticing it you have traversed a great distance; thestrange has become familiar and the familiar if notstrange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrowngarment. And some people travel far more thanothers. There are those who receive as birthright an adequateor at least unquestioned sense of self and thosewho set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or forsatisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit valuesand practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have toburn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.”