Be Kind: Rewind

As a high school student I walked the three miles around my neighborhood every day for exercise. I got to know every mailbox, dog, tree, pothole, and storm drain in every kind of weather and at every time of day. It comforted me to know my own stomping grounds so intimately, considering that I went through high school unable to map my own identity.

The same cannot be said for Quinn in Auster's City of Glass. The more he walks the same grounds in New York, the less he seems to know about himself. It's as if my neighborhood walking was a rewinding of character, while his is an unwinding. I found that my daily walks allowed me to collect myself and think more clearly about what I had to accomplish for the evening, while he seems to lose more of his identity with every step. Perhaps it's the complex nature of his task that makes his walks different from mine. I always left the house with no qualms about anything, because it was my one time of day when I could be alone. Quinn is conversely so isolated that it doesn't matter whether or not he's alone on his walks: he is unraveling all the same with the intensity of his task. The more he invests in it, the more of himself he loses. The difficulty for him lies in the tradeoff: should he continue following Stillman, which gives him a sense of literal and figurative direction, or should he stop walking and lose direction in order to save his identity?