Despair Is Easy, Or At Least Low

The Rhythm Of Walking Generates A Kind Of Rhythm Of Thinking, And The Passage Through A Landscape Echoes Or Stimulates The Passage Through A Series Of Thoughts. The Creates An Odd Consonance Between Internal And External Passage, One That Suggests That The Mind Is Also A Landscape Of Sorts And That Walking Is One Way To Traverse It. A New Thought Often Seems Like A Feature Of The Landscape That Was There All Along, As Though Thinking Were Traveling Rather Than Making.

The Things We Want Are Transformative, And We Don’t Know Or Only Think We Know What Is On The Other Side Of That Transformation Never To Get Lost Is Not To Live.

In Her Novel Regeneration, Pat Barker Writes Of A Doctor Who 'knew Only Too Well How Often The Early Stages Of Change Or Cure May Mimic Deterioration. Cut A Chrysalis Open, And You Will Find A Rotting Caterpillar. What You Will Never Find Is That Mythical Creature, Half Caterpillar, Half Butterfly, A Fit Emblem Of The Human Soul, For Those Whose Cast Of Mind Leads Them To Seek Such Emblems. No, The Process Of Transformation Consists Almost Entirely Of Decay.

It Is The Job Of Artists To Open Doors And Invite In Prophesies, The Unknown, The Unfamiliar; It’s Where Their Work Comes From, Although Its Arrival Signals The Beginning Of The Long Disciplined Process Of Making It Their Own. Scientists Too, As J. Robert Oppenheimer Once Remarked, ‘live Always At The ‘edge Of Mystery’­—the Boundary Of The Unknown.’ But They Transform The Unknown Into The Known, Haul It In Like Fishermen; Artists Get You Out Into That Dark Sea.

Walkers Are 'practitioners Of The City,' For The City Is Made To Be Walked. A City Is A Language, A Repository Of Possibilities, And Walking Is The Act Of Speaking That Language, Of Selecting From Those Possibilities. Just As Language Limits What Can Be Said, Architecture Limits Where One Can Walk, But The Walker Invents Other Ways To Go.