ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with a discussion of Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of heteroglossia—always incorporating or acknowledging the language of another—and its specific expression in the “sideways glance.” Wandering in its otherness and in its overlap with related concepts, from journeys and exile to walking and migration, might seem to incorporate its own version of the sideward glance. Wanderers recognize implicitly that they fall outside the standard (homogeneous?) patterns of settled lives. Wandering, as a subject of inquiry, shares in this implicit outlier quality, as if always in resistance to summary statements or generalizations, which necessarily absorb some degree of incompleteness or insufficiency, imparting its own peculiar sideward glance. This chapter then proceeds with five general propositions—identified as “glances” and discussed at paragraph length—on the subject of wandering. It concludes by reflecting on the absences in a life of wandering. Wanderers don’t keep a schedule; they don’t have to-do lists; they threw away their appointment books. They have no interest the proposition that time is money or in generational wealth. Wanderers, in return for their rich refusals, inhabit a space open-ended with diminished possibilities.
