- Why does de Certeau begin a chapter titled “Walking in the City” at the top of the World Trade Center in Manhatten?
de Certeau repeatedly refers to New York City as a story or text to be read, whose rhetoric is made up by the experiences and lives of the people walking throughout the city. On page 93, he says of these various authors, “they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text they write” (93) These texts of New York cannot be read from just anywhere in the city however, as de Certeau remarks on how one must disentangle themselves from the everyday bustle of NYC’s streets in order to see the city from a reader’s lens. de Certeau does his reading at the summit of the World Trade Center tower, and describes how his heightened transforms the city: “His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows him to read it, to be a solar eye looking down like a god.” (92) The idea de Certeau conveys here is that in order to read the text written by those who are walking in the city, one must be at a high enough elevation “to be a solar eye”, and to see the city not as a murky intertwining of daily behaviors, but as a vast texturology with a never-ending story to tell. de Certeau believes the people walking in the city are fundamental pieces to the story of New York, and since this story can only be read from atop a tall building, he begins his chapter titled “Walking in the City” on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center Building.
(255)
2. Why are “haunted places” the only ones people can live in?
Speaking on the subject of places and memories, de Certeau says, “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence”. (108) Here, de Certeau uses the word “spirits” to describe not only the lingering spiritual presence of deceased peoples who used to live in any given place, but to also communicate meaning of any memories or important happenings that may have taken place in an area in the past. Describing these memories as haunting spirits gives them the eerie image of being ghosts of past events, memories lingering around places even long after no one remembers what happened. Because de Certeau says that there is no place not haunted by spirits, people have no choice but to live in haunted places. I at first interpreted this statement as hyperbole, as it seemed highly unlikely that every human home in the world is haunted. But as I contemplated where humans have chosen to live over the course of our existence, as well as how many different ways in which a place can be haunted by a spirit (spirits of memories, beings, past events), I came to agree with de Certeau in his belief that an event had to occur at some point in time that resulted in a spiritual, “haunting” memory in every home currently occupied by humans around the world.
(214)
