ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter, as it pursues how to understand wandering, begins with Martin Heidegger’s book What Is Called Thinking? “We shall never learn what ‘is called’ swimming, for example, or what it ‘calls for’ by reading a treatise on swimming,” he writes. “Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming.” Wandering, explored in a similarly pragmatic, experiential, immersive approach, will not yield an organized treatise, but it offers up observations and reflections that help to clarify the difficulties in understanding. One important caution is not to romanticize wandering, despite its importance to Romantic poets and novelists, because in certain cases it resembles getting lost and serves as a source of terror. It remains unclear what social magic occurs to transform a person who wanders into a wanderer, but it likely involves duration and patternlessness. This chapter does not seek to solve the difficulties of understanding but to illustrate them and to emphasize their importance.
