"people's path" and "the boy on the moon"

My favourite thing today: stumbling on a "people's path" as I walked home from my dentist's appointment (the anti-favourite part of my day!) this afternoon. People's paths--paths made by people simply walking--crop up all over the place in winter: diagonals in the snow across fields, lawns, even the tiny diagonals on street corners when walkers cut across the right angle. This afternoon I noticed stamped-down snow between a few trees by the Museum of Nature and it was a people's path defining a short cut for my route home as well as a different way to walk. I like these paths because they're efficient, unexpected, and usually break the rules in some small way, charting out, as they do, where one isn't really supposed to go. You see them all the time in summer too: flattened grass from people's passing feet or shallow grooves etched in the dirt to make a path.

The best thing I've read on such paths is from a passage cited in a book, Postmodernism and Japan. The essay's author, Naoki Sakai, cites Lu Xun as follows: "As I dozed, a stretch of jade-green seashore spread itself before my eyes, and above a round golden moon hung from a deep blue sky. I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men [or women] pass one way, a road is made" (121).

And here's an item from the favourite things list: Ian Brown's memoir, The Boy on the Moon. I haven't read this book yet but I read many excerpts from it in the G&B a few years ago and it was truly amazing. It made me think entirely differently about mental and physical disabilities in the same way that an earlier book, Expecting Adam, by Martha Beck, made me think entirely differently about down syndrome.