Have you ever walked along a street and imagined the lives of the strangers that you pass?
In Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, the narrator explores this imaginative act of dipping in and out of people’s minds as they move through the city’s wintry, twilight streets. From prime ministers to the homeless, the narrator examines the city’s inhabitants and the spaces they occupy. ‘What greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality’, the narrator asks, to feel ‘that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others’.
Source: The British Library, 20th Century Literature Collection Items as found at: http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/street-haunting-an-essay-by-virginia-woolf
Naked Cities Journal 