The narrator’s discussion of movement addresses what she sees as the fundamental human instinct towards travel, exploration, and novelty. The narrator understands movement as taking place within a fluid exchange of time and space, and constant movement through travel allows the narrator to experience time and space as fluid. The work’s structure—the narrator’s travel fragments interspersed with fictional stories—reinforces this theme of movement, as the reader follows the narrator’s thoughts despite very few overt referents to time or place. The movement is between characters, stories, curiosities, and states of awareness, with the narrator’s personality emerging even in the work’s fictional sections and thus blurring temporal and physical boundaries.

The narrator first understands that movement is crucial to her life when she is a child watching the river near her house: “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest” (4). From that moment, the narrator seeks to emulate the life of a river, flowing around obstacles and undergoing constant change. She describes her personality as inconsistent and decides not to pursue a career as a psychologist because of the stasis that personality profiling implies.