Asking again
Ten minutes after a stranger has told you the way, you stop somebody else and ask again. You don’t mention the first one. You ask as if you had just come out of the station into a city you had never seen. The second stranger doesn’t ask whether anyone has told you already, though two streets from a busy corner the answer is very probably yes.
Entry 55 found that directions come in two parts: the arm points at the end, and the words give the start. You did the start. Left at the pub, second right, both where they were said to be. The trouble is the middle. Directions are recited from the giver’s memory of the route, and memory squeezes whatever stretch it never has to think about. “Then just keep going” can cover four hundred metres and three junctions, each of which looks as if it might be the one. People don’t usually ask again because they are lost. They ask at the first junction the words left out, where the street stopped matching the sentence.
The second question is a different shape from the first. The first was open: how do I get to the station? The second is closed: is this the way to the station? It is said while facing the way you were already walking, often with a small nod in that direction. It doesn’t ask for a route, only for a yes. That shape is the only trace the first stranger leaves. The question has someone else’s directions built into it, and the person answering can’t hear them.
Leaving the first stranger out is not carelessness. Say “a man back there told me left at the pub” and the person in front of you is suddenly being asked to judge. Either the man was wrong, which is a complaint about someone who stopped to help, or you weren’t listening, which is a confession. The closed question asks for neither. It lets both of you leave the first stranger out of it with his reputation intact.
Sometimes the second answer disagrees with the first. Usually neither is wrong: there are two ways, and each person knows their own. Now you hold two routes and nothing to weigh them with except which one is fresher, and most people follow the second. It was told from nearer, so it has less middle in it.
The one thing almost nobody does is walk back past the first. If the new route turns you round, past the bus stop where he is still waiting, people cross the road, or take the long way round the block. Nothing would happen if you didn’t. He might not even recognise you. But he would see you going the wrong way after being told the right one, and his directions would end up being judged after all, by the one person who can’t ask about them.
So a stranger crosses a city in shrinking legs, asking again wherever the words ran out, each answer covering a little less ground than the last. A route across an unfamiliar town is often three strangers long, and each of them thinks they were the only one.
Coordinates: conversation · memory