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In praise of the unmapped hour

It is a curious feature of our age that we have acquired the means never to be lost and have, in the process, mislaid something we did not know we owned. The small blue dot that trembles reassuringly on a phone screen has abolished the old, faintly humiliating ritual of turning a map upside down on a pavement. Nobody laments the humiliation. What deserves a little more thought is what the ritual quietly supplied.

To be lost, in the strict sense, is not merely to lack information; it is to be forced into attention. A traveller who cannot say where she is must notice where she is: the colour of the shutters, the gradient of the street, the smell of bread drifting from a doorway that may or may not belong to a bakery. Orientation, in other words, used to be a by-product of vigilance. Now that it has been outsourced, vigilance has been outsourced with it, and we move through unfamiliar cities with our eyes on a screen, arriving punctually and remembering nothing.

Researchers who study spatial memory distinguish between two ways of knowing a place. One is the route: a chain of instructions, turn left at the fountain, then right, then straight on. The other is the survey, a mental map in which landmarks relate to one another regardless of the path taken. Routes are cheap to follow and cheaper to forget; surveys are costly to build but durable. Turn-by-turn guidance, by design, delivers the first and starves the second. It would be rash to claim that this alone makes us worse navigators, since the evidence is still accumulating and people differ enormously, but it would be equally rash to assume that a skill we never exercise remains in perfect order.

I do not propose a return to paper. I have met the person who insists on paper, and he is generally insufferable, given to sighing at junctions and describing his own sense of direction as though it were a minor talent for the cello. Nostalgia of that sort is merely vanity in walking boots. My suggestion is of a different order: that once in a while, deliberately, we should switch the device off and permit ourselves an unmapped hour.

The rules are simple. Choose a district you do not know, and a time of day when nothing depends on punctuality. Walk without a destination, but not without a thread: follow the downhill streets, or the tramlines, or the sound of a market. When you are lost, and you will be, a little, which is the point, resist the reflex to consult. Ask a stranger, if you must. Strangers, it turns out, are the original navigation technology, and they come with commentary included.

What one gains is difficult to quantify, and I am wary of those who promise otherwise. Some of it is plainly practical: a place walked without assistance sticks in the mind in a way that a place followed does not. Some of it is harder to name. There is a particular quality of alertness that arrives about twenty minutes into genuine uncertainty, when the anxiety has burned off and curiosity has not yet given way to irritation. It is not quite pleasure. It resembles the attentiveness of a child, for whom every doorway is still a question.

Naturally, there is a paradox in all this, and I would be a poor essayist if I pretended not to see it. To schedule an hour of spontaneity is to defeat it, rather as a surprise party loses something once the guest of honour has seen the invitation. I can only reply that most worthwhile habits begin as contrivances. Nobody is born wanting to read before sleep, or to walk to work; we arrange the conditions and wait for the wanting to follow.

So I shall continue to carry the phone. It is, after all, extremely useful on the evenings when I am tired, late, and lost in the unromantic way. But I have begun to keep a little ledger of the unmapped hours, and I note, with some surprise, that I can still recall the streets of each of them, whereas the destinations I reached by blue dot have already blurred into a single, efficient grey.