Use Their Words: "We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon to avoid having to look back over our shoulder in embarrassment."

"What accounts for the popularity of watching folks walk for long days? . . . The truth is that many waves sweep mass society that have no more explanation than the oceanic kind: a random blast of wind drives a swell, it snags on a rock, and then the wave crashes. By the late eighteen-seventies, walking had started getting ferocious hate mail, or sermons, chiefly from New York City preachers, who thundered against it as a "gladitorial" sport. Soon there was legislation, still on the books, prohibiting six-day walking marathons.

The contests, one comes to see, were no longer really walking competitions. Mostly, they were, or became, something crueller. They were competitions in not sleeping. The ability to walk well--to have [Edward Payson] Weston's odd big stride or [Daniel] O'Leary's right light step--had surrendered to the more brutal ability just to stay awake for six days. (Weston eventually admitted to having chewed coca leaves while racing, although, Barry Bonds-like, he strenuously denied that the drug really helped.) The crowds were not coming to watch the walkers walk. They were coming to watch them drop.

Competitive walking, in its maturity, turns out to be less a charming game from an age of innocence than one more episode in the modern fascination with rituals of human endurance, made exotic by technological advance, and fuelled by the same morbid curiosity that gives us the demolition derby, books about survival on Everest, and the ice-bound stunts of David Blaine, along with "Survivor" and "Deadliest Catch." Our appetite for watching people stumble from exhaustion soon moves from one kind of spectacle to the next, perhaps partly because we're ashamed of having enjoyed the previous one. This may also explain why each one, when it goes, can leave so little track behind. We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon to avoid having to look back over our shoulder in embarrassment."

- Heaven's Gaits: What we do when we walk by Adam Gopnik, from the September 1, 2014 issue of the New Yorker

It's not quite the same situation, but as a Serial completist I wonder how that show will fare in the annals of history. Any number of its"characters" could be considered exemplars of "human endurance" - the subjects (Adnan, Jay, and the rest) as well as Sarah Koenig and her colleagues. Morbid curiosity? I think we can all agree the show has that in spades.

Looking uneasily over my shoulder.



Thanks to S&J for the most edifying, and most voluminous, of all of our wonderful wedding presents.