More specifically concerning: walking
26 December 2000 – Rome
26 December 2000, around 19.44.
Wandered to the Villa Borghese, a rather large park containing such interesting things as the British School at Rome and the Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderna. It being a sunny day, I didn’t much mind getting lost, and wandered past and around the Temple of Faustina with much amusement before finding the Viale delle Belle […]
stroll
11 October 2003, around 17.45.
Church Way, Iffley.
peripatetic
20 August 2004, around 17.51.
The look of sunflowers bent in the streetlight. Streets butting into dead ends and empty lots (still smelling of farmland), signposted ‘private property, trespassing, loitering forbidden’. Circumspect distance maintained between pedestrians while waiting for the crosswalk signal in pseudo-suburbia: ca. eight feet. Inconvenient end of the concrete sidewalk in molehills, broken glass, blackberry brambles and […]
movements
16 July 2006, around 21.44.
After about two hours of reading or discussion, we would go for a walk and then have tea at Lyons, or in the restaurant above the Regal cinema. Sometimes he came to my house in Searle street for supper. Once after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common. We […]
hold my coat and snicker
29 March 2008, around 0.38.
I remember being told by a teacher not to read Jane Eyre, because I would be reading it in her class in the fall. Of course I read it that summer. Propped in bed, or curled in a corner, but finally finishing peripatetic. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I walked the three miles from […]
pedestrian
20 April 2008, around 5.35.
In 1938 let us say, a bloke with small means wants the best of Europe. Once he cd. have done a great deal on foot. I dare say he still can. In 1911 there was an international currency (20 franc pieces) twenty such in jug-purse and no god-damned passports. (Hell rot Wilson AND the emperor, […]
astrolabe
17 September 2008, around 2.23.
Upon a Sunday morning, then, my father was walking round the lake which he had caused to be created, regretting that he had not moved the old river bed further back, and thinking out possible fantasies in stone, torrents to fall through the hanging woods above, pavilions upon islands and decorative effects generally (a few […]
A view (29)
15 May 2010, around 23.23.
graves in old Goris.
a ramble
13 November 2011, around 16.10.
View of Darkhan. The snow stays on the ground mingling with the dust, not melting even under the sun. Everything is very dry. The dust is the same color and texture of finely ground coffee, as though one could scoop it up into a սրճեփ and enjoy one’s cup of bitterness on the rolling steppe. […]
up to nature
4 September 2016, around 6.02.
Mirror Lake on an overcast day Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. [ . . . ] If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much. –Mary Oliver, ‘How I go to […]
praeterita
10 January 2017, around 6.32.
It has become the favored place to go for a stroll. It is quiet. The world passes through slowly, the shifting seasons providing the most dramatic changes – fallen branches, frost heaves, holly berries, and flowers in spring. One sets external concerns aside; even the most tenacious anxiety or care has been, by the time […]
mistook
12 August 2017, around 12.00.
out for a walk
23 December 2017, around 10.40.
Astoria
29 October 2019, around 6.51.
habitus
20 January 2020, around 9.19.
It is pleasant to return to familiar walks, a matter of habitus.
consolations
6 April 2020, around 14.27.
Reading odd bits of books in the evening as consolation for not being able to manage a satisfactory photo of any of the nurse stumps on the short walk through the woods I love the wind even if, exactly, my imagination tends to give it ferocious shapes and colors. Battered by the wind, I go […]
a singular philosophy
13 November 2020, around 7.00.
The view from the ridge, circa late summer 2017. The path that I like to walk (and have for some years) is the beginning of a nine-mile trail that goes up to a Forest Service lookout (which I have not yet reached, and probably never will, by that route). The trail climbs a series of […]
the forest path
23 March 2021, around 5.38.
Sometime near the end of last November or beginning of December I managed to hurt my left heel. For the first two weeks or so I didn’t allow myself to think too much about it and kept my daily routine of walking (usually some three to five miles, depending on the weather and my inclinations), […]
16.06.2021: morning
16 June 2021, around 15.20.
Awake at ten past four with the clear impression, through earplugs, that someone has spoken my name. Light of the lamp slowly dawning. The dog nudges the rattling doorknob, then click-click-click away down the hall. A trip to the necessary reveals nothing new, and a short doze passes the time before the alarum. One stares […]
ianua
14 January 2022, around 5.41.
Christmas day. Light snow overnight, everything looking somewhat magical – clear and fresh. We plan a walk to the river, because it is a challenge getting the dog to cross the highway, but later she can run off-leash without the likelihood of encountering anybody (though who would one expect to encounter at just after sunup […]
peripatetic
19 August 2022, around 9.12.
From the morning walk.
in waves
4 November 2022, around 16.03.
Walked out in the downpour to pick up holds from the library – a biography of Walter Benjamin and Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James, neither of which I am likely to read at the moment but which did, however, give me a destination. Mostly I wanted to be out walking in the rain […]
caliginous
27 January 2023, around 4.22.
…it is necessary for us to name the things that share our own silence with us, not in order to disturb their privacy or to disturb our own solitude with thoughts of them, but in order that the silence they dwell in and that dwells in them, may be concretized and identified for what it […]
ataraxy
4 February 2023, around 16.32.
…he did not want to do away with his scepticism, precisely because he wanted to doubt. That is his prerogative. But one should not attribute to him the stupidity that he believed one doubted with necessity, or by the same token what is even dumber, that if such were the case, doubt could be abolished. […]
fleeting
21 February 2023, around 11.44.
Undoubtedly, the landscape will be endearing to someone in the future, even if it changes again. People live in the world of their own moment. They get used to their environment and cannot waste emotions on grieving over everything that has changed. —Andri Snær Magnason (On Time and Water, trans. Lytton Smith, p. 251)
byways
13 July 2023, around 4.42.
…scarce appeareth any calamity, but if time be taken and opportunitie laid holde on, helpe and release doth as readely present it selfe, to the comforte of such as trauaile vnder the burthen, as affliction is readie to charge them… —Timothie Bright (A treatise of melancholie)
cathectical
21 December 2023, around 6.17.
We are constantly telling stories—about how we are, about every person we see, hear, hear about—and when we don’t know something, we fill in the gaps with parts of stories we’ve told or heard before. Stories are always only representations. […] to tell a story based on a character-driven plot or a moment of epiphany […]
dotty
3 February 2024, around 18.45.
So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up, Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and […]
avaritia
20 February 2024, around 15.13.
Out walking the dog (not because she asked for a walk, but because I wasn’t able to concentrate on work and had nothing better to do), I was trying to think of destinations for a longer walk (the real walk of the day, without the dog), and thought about going to the bookstore to get […]