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for children.
    These bare facts led me to really read the signs throughout the mall, and I traced undisguised symbolism everywhere. Thin-bodied letters were used to sell beauty products (you won’t find many fat, inky fonts in Bath & Body Works). RadioShack seemed to observe a zero-tolerance policy regarding serifs, which are reserved for products that appeal to classicism and tradition (see the Lands’ End clothing section at Sears). Every letter in the mall seemed to exude purpose, as if hand-chiseled by market testers.
    Suddenly the mall didn’t seem quite as simple as it had just a couple minutes before. Instead of being a vacuous purgatory that deserved pity, the mall grew in complexity with each stride. The point that the how-to-explore books collectively hammered home is this: if you sincerely investigate it, every detail hides reason, and any environment is far more sophisticated than our senses can appreciate. You have no justification for feeling world-weary; even if the modern world bombards you with a million images per second, you have not seen it all. Ruskin writes:
    Â 
There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon, too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted
using.
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    For a while, I tried to inventory all of the smells I could detect and trace them to their sources: the dyed fabrics in Maurices clothing store; the brushed suede in Payless Shoes; the jasmine-and-sandalwood of the cosmetics counter in the Elder-Beerman department store. While concentrating hard to identify the characteristic smell of an electronics aisle in Sears (did I really detect the subtle tang of burning circuits?), a three-year-old boy accompanied his mother to inspect the DVD players. The kid wouldn’t shut up. “I want this one! I want this one!” Every ten seconds or so, for reasons only he can grasp, he’d shriek like a beluga whale—three high, raspy squawks. My concentration shattered into a hundred pieces. I lost the scent.
    But I remembered that I was carrying an electronic voice recorder—a device that I believe the author of
The Music of Nature,
had he lived into our century, would carry on his person at all times. I fished it out of my pocket and covertly began recording the boy’s voice.
    For the next half hour or so, I digitally captured the discrete units of sound that collectively composed the mall’s soundscape. The hum of the refrigerator at Mom’s Legendary Foods. The splash of the decorative water fountain in the geographic center of the concourse. The squeaky wheel of one of the race-car-shaped strollers available near the main entrance. The rapid-fire percussion of a cash register.
    Some things, surely, deserve to be ignored, for sanity’s sake. At times, I worried I might have been too loose with my attentions at the mall. Emerson had warned against this sort of thing, believing that indiscriminate observation could turn a person into a mere child—“the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing . . .”
    It’s true that the techniques outlined in these books can be abused, and they should be applied sparingly, medicinally. But I was discovering unexplored territories within the commonplace, and it felt as if I was beginning to correct an imbalance that had taken hold years before, when I’d pedal out to the mall to pump tokens into Galaga and Tempest, losing hours staring into a digital display. Video