About The Pedestrian

Wel­come to The Ped­es­tri­an, a new quarterly journ­al that seeks to ex­plore the or­din­ary. It is easy to find cov­er­age of big events, big ideas and big­ger-than-life people. But as for life’s un­as­sum­ing fea­tures, as for our less the­or­et­ic­al, more prac­tic­al thoughts, and as for the people we daily in­ter­act with, they fail to in­spire a com­par­able de­gree of sus­tained re­flec­tion. For this reas­on The Ped­es­tri­an was foun­ded, so that the people and things that are fa­mil­i­ar – or have be­come too fa­mil­i­ar – might be al­lowed to en­chant.

Each of our quarterly is­sues will present a single top­ic and ex­plore it from a vari­ety of per­spect­ives, most of­ten mak­ing use of the “fa­mil­i­ar” (or “per­son­al”) es­say, a genre well suited to ex­plor­ing the or­din­ary. We will an­tho­lo­gize es­says from the past that are rel­ev­ant to each top­ic, some by clas­sic es­say­ists (Mon­taigne, Haz­litt, Chester­ton, Woolf, and White, for ex­ample) and some by people less well-known. In ad­di­tion, we will pub­lish new con­tri­bu­tions that carry on the tra­di­tion of what Michel de Mon­taigne coined the “essai” – con­ver­sa­tion­al “at­tempts” at an hon­est ex­plor­a­tion of an in­di­vidu­al’s or­din­ary, every­day ex­per­i­ence.

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