From a literary standpoint, Riverwalking takes some interesting design risks. The essays are ordered such that the reader is brought without a framework across some difficult territory, as Moore presents loss after loss in her life and a quiet sense of desolation grows. I confess that I almost put the book down at several points, for while Moore painted her pictures well and clearly, I wasn't sure that she was approaching any sort of resolution: although she discussed each loss, she didn't seem to grip them to herself honestly, but instead seemed as if she were looking at her life through the abstracting distance of a telescope. But on page 167, Moore finally brings it all together, and, retracing her steps to her beginning studies in philosophy, starts to put meaning into the emptiness.

I explained to Professor Brauner that I planned to write about René Descartes, the philosopher who set out in 1641 to doubt everything, including the fact of his own existence. What had happened to Descartes, I wanted to know, what had he seen, what strange turn had his life taken, that would make him wonder--even as a thought experiment--if his belief in himself was a bad dream?... Professor Brauner looked me up and down... and then he said this: "There is one thing you will need to learn. And that is that philosophy is not about life. Philosophy is about ideas. Life and ideas are not the same." I never doubted him... The possibility never entered my mind that a philosophy professor might be wrong about philosophy, or about life...

And here, suddenly, Riverwalking takes on a revolutionary carriage. For Moore has been carefully studying her life -- true, often with a distracting philosopher's lens, but she has been talking about real, concrete things like daughters and sons, parents and water, newts and stars. The confluence broadens here: it is a marriage of ideas and reality that she is struggling to find, a bridge between nature and mind. What place does the philosopher have when standing in a river? Is there a sort of philosophy that encompasses this wordless and powerful reality, is there a way to get to a place where idea and life are inseparable, or at least good friends? Moore reveals how her profession is often a profession without roots:

So the philosophers I met in graduate school wrote about pure, slick-surfaced ideas like truth and consistency, but not about home. Not about landscape or work. "I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses," and no one will ever "be able to mislead me in anything," Descartes said, So it's no wonder that "the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes and sounds" faded from the philosophical discussions in my graduate seminars.