Comment by iraphael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iraphael | Hacker News Reader

> Call it an exercise in eccentricity or futility, and you'd probably be right.

The art geek in me sees this 'exercise in eccentricity or futility' a rather interesting activity. Yes, he walked every street, but as he said it himself:

> Nothing is forever, though. I can only claim to have walked every street in this city at this moment in time. New streets are being built as I write.

He has only walked through every street in SF as they currently stand. His prize is ephemeral. Tomorrow, a coffee shop will open and he won't have seen it. Heck, coffee shops probably opened in the timespan it took for him to finish his journey.

And yet, despite not being able to say "I have seen everything in SF" for long, he can still say "I have seen everything in SF at the moment I saw them". While this may seem a little obvious or silly, it shows how every experience we ever have is unique to us.

I apologize for ending with a cliché but my only conclusion is that the we live for the journey, not for the destination. Because when we reach our destination - when we have finally seen every building in SF - we realize what we have seen is gone, and new things took their place.

Something about that is incredibly interesting to me. And for some reason it makes me sad:

You cannot fully understand even a city. It takes too much time -- as soon as you understand one piece, the other pieces have changed.

Cities are small, in the grand scheme of things. When it comes to larger things-- states, nations, planets, there's no way you could ever fully understand them. All you can get is a tiny, ephemeral snapshot, stuck in time.

It's humbling to think about, and I don't really know why it makes me sad.

Likewise, you can't fully understand yourself, your friends, family or partner. As with the city, you gain what understanding you can from your experience with them.

This comment reminds me of a book by Italo Calvino. Probably my favorite of his. It's a collection of stories told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan about cities in his domain. Somewhat fantastical, but strikes deep to the heart to transitory nature of cities and perception itself.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0156453800/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...

A few dazzling lines on wanderlust from Invisible Cities:

... Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. ...

And Marco's answer to that: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

A related thought is what an unfathomable amount of information is being created all the time. For instance just on YouTube 300 hours of video are now uploaded every minute. Even if all you did was consume 24/7, you can never catch up and will always be falling hopelessly behind.

The dynamism of cities is one of their primary draws.

Most people don't want to live in an environment they fully understand. They want to live in one that is constantly developing, progressing, and providing fresh stimuli.

This is the author's last line:

Temporarily, though, I can say this: If you live in San Francisco, I've walked by your house.

Dunno if it's just me, but that idea struck me as hilarious.

I'd like to think the author has wrestled with the valid points you've mentioned, and has concluded that the only thing you can do about the inevitable march of time is to laugh in its face :)

It's like astronomy: you can look up and see it all at once, but what you see "now" is the just-arriving view of what happened minutes or billions of years ago. Getting a grasp on what constitutes "now" can be rather distressing when you really think about it.

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