Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest-that calls for quite a different schooling. Then signboards and street names, passersby, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center.