Friday Six Miles
Life of the mind
Cool piece from the New Yorker, here.
This paragraph is awesome:
But humanism is exactly why, in my view, a classroom with human bodies in it, struggling over the meaning of a short story, works. Because the literary arts are not the same as the study of economics or astrophysics. The literary arts are about emotions and human consciousness, and so the instruction can’t be converted into data points. The literary arts are more about a human in the room feeling something, expressing it, and the other humans listening, and, ideally, feeling similarly. Such is the invention of compassion. Our instruction is not only about dispensing information; it is also about bearing witness, grappling with the complexities of another.
If you replace “short story” with history or urban studies, this paragraph still holds.
Thursday Walk: 7.25
PAndemic
OED has the first occurrence in 1666:
1666: G. Harvey Morbus Anglicus i. 2 Some [diseases] do more generally haunt a Country..whence such diseases are termed Endemick or Pandemick.
Later today I have to poke around and find the extended article that someone has written about the evolution of this word.
Thursday Eight Mile
Plague quote
“And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
Seven Mile Monday
Four Mile Walk
I could also have counted clorox wipes on the ground as well as masks. C’mon now people.
Seven Mile Saturday
Three articles
One on photography during this time.
One on reading and appreciating Shakespeare during this time.
One obituary that makes me thing I should use this time to walk all of the blocks of Philadelphia. Easier now, with runkeeper and other apps as I could create maps each time. Hmmmm…
