I recently invested in a new bike, and ride it most days to the library, where I’m researching my encyclopedia of aphorists. When I lived in Amsterdam, I rode a bike every day, several times a day: from work to home, from home to shop, from train to tram, from anywhere to everywhere. The bicycle is the principal mode of transport in the Netherlands, and I quickly came to take the experience for granted. That’s not the case in London, though, at least not for me, at least not yet. Until recently, I travelled almost exclusively by Tube, with the occasional local car journey thrown in. So riding a bike has opened my eyes to aspects of the city I’ve never seen before, or never paid much attention to: buildings I never really looked at properly, hidden parks and lovely little squares, whole neighborhoods I would never have entered but for the bike path that threads through them. My current favorite thing to see on my daily two-wheeled commute is the canal that traverses London, at the point where it spills down from Camden Lock.In fact, the experience gives me the same feeling I had when taking the canal tour in Amsterdam. I was always eager to drag visiting friends and relatives on these circumnavigations of the city center because suddenly you’re three or four meters below street level looking up at all the gorgeous facades of the stately 16th- and 17th-century canal houses. It provided a view I never saw from my bicycle, and renewed my appreciation for the sedate beauty of Amsterdam, its placid grace, its intimacy. I also became expert at distinguishing neck gables from stepped gables from bell gables. The sensation is analagous to riding on the top deck of a doubledecker bus, except you’re three or four meters above street level rather than below it. The effect is the same, though. The route may be entirely undramatic, maybe it’s a route you take every day, but your perspective on it is dramatically changed and you see it with fresh eyes. The bird’s or fish’s eye view invests the whole seen with a different, enhanced significance. Your perspective, both literally and psychologically, changes so you notice new things and see old things in a new way. From my bike, with a soft, warm March rain on my face, London’s gritty, grand beauty has a whole new charm for me.

Schopenhauer may have been totally wrong about happiness (see my posting of March 25) but he did know a thing or two about writing:

The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Maybe my task as a cyclist (or pedestrian, motorist or couch potato for that matter) is not to seek out great scenery but to find the interest in the small scenes that surround me daily. Changing my point of view is a good place to start.