10.7.2026 – the brain camera

the brain camera
records all such moments with
sounds scents emotions

But when we walk, the environment changes every moment and our senses are continuously being alerted. Around each corner of a city block, around each bend in a country road, there is something new to greet the eyes, the ears, the nose. Even the same walk, the one we may take every day, is never the same from one day to another, from one week and season to another.

This is true not only in the country, but anywhere at all. In New York City, a group of executives meets every weekday morning to walk from their homes in Brooklyn Heights to their offices in downtown Manhattan. Their way takes them through quiet streets of old brownstones, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, then up and over the Brooklyn Bridge with its cathedral arches supporting the weblike drapery of cables, then down into the tight skyscraper canyons of the financial district.

As it happens, Bill, a photographer, had his camera with him, being a convinced member of the school of photography that believes you get your good pictures only on foot—in his own words, “A photographer must walk if he is to be a photographer at all.”

He got some excellent pictures.

But even if he had not had his camera to record them, they would be his forever, on the indelible film of his mind. The camera of the brain records all such moments, and records them, moreover, in their full orchestration, with the accompanying sounds and scents, most of all with the accompanying emotions.

From The Magic of Walking by Aaron Sussman (Fireside: New York, 1980).