Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness
Nathanael Johnson
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The more closely we looked the more the world opened itself to us, as if to reward our attention.”
“None of the ginkgo's aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It's not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal or rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take open-hearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.”
“If we come to love nature not only when it is rare and beautiful, but also when it is commonplace and even annoying, I believe it will heal the great wound of our species: our self-imposed isolation from the rest of life, our loneliness for nature. We might remember that we are no different from our surroundings, that the trees and birds are as much our neighbors as other humans. We might remember that before the land belonged to us, we belonged to it. We could belong again.”
“The first step is to stop thinking of nature as something far away that we must save from someone else and start seeing it all around us. The first step is to open our eyes to the existence of nature in our daily lives.”
“The aim of the book you are holding is to persuade people (myself first and foremost) to slow down enough to see the wonders around us.”
“Many of the people who regularly feed and cultivate relationships with pigeons are themselves on the fringes of society. They are disconnected from other people due to poverty, limited language skills, or mental illness, but they form deep emotional connections with the birds.”
“It's simply not possible to always see the world fresh and in full, like a child, while also making money, paying bills on time, and taking care of a family...But doing this work and occasionally acting like a two-year-old pays dividends of awe and pleasure. It doesn't take very much time to notice that you live within nature...Wonder doesn't come from outside after driving somewhere spectacular, it comes from within: It's a union of the natural world and the mind prepared to receive it.”
“I have a fantasy about being the kind of father who notices on his commute that the chestnuts on a nearby tree are ripe and brings home an armful to roast--the kind of person who is able to gather up richness where others see nothing worth noting.”
“pigeons could not very well serve as a marker of nobility once they became, well, common. Aristocracy demands exclusivity.”
“goal was not to become a walking encyclopedia, but to find the richness and complexity in what I had previously thought were nondescript city blocks. I wasn’t interested in facts per se, I was interested in living a more meaningful life. “Facts are stupid things,” the nineteenth-century naturalist Louis Agassiz observed, “until brought into connection with some general law.”
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Book Keywords:
mental-illness, poverty, observant, belonging, notice-of-nature, wonder, richness-in-nature, awe, attention, connection-to-nature, nature, fringe-of-society
