Category Archives: Walking
Simultaneous Experience
My third quarter project in history asks students to do something like this extraordinary mural. Here you have two panels: one in Iraq, the other from a nearby park. How do you reconcile the two? How do these lives intersect? How do they connect? Can one exist without the other? Can we deny one and not the other?
Sunday Walk
I was thinking a lot about this article as I was walking.
But the truth is that the longer I have lived, and the shorter my future, the less pursuing I have done. Some of this may come from a peculiarly Irish positive pessimism — be happy, things will get worse — more of it from the history of disappointment all artists know and the rest from a remnant Catholic guilt that says you don’t deserve happiness anyway. The point is, in my case, happiness seemed a thing that could not be pursued, only realized and chosen.
This is the ending of the article:
“I mean, what do you do to be happy?”
The question was a novelty to him and he considered it from all sides before answering.
“When I want a holiday,” he said at last, “I go over the road as far as the meadow. I go in there, take off my jacket, and lay down on it. I watch the world turning for a bit, with me still in it.”
He smiled then, and held me in his blue Atlantic eyes, full of the ordinary wisdom of a well-lived life, a wisdom that saw the many failings of the world but our still breathing and dreaming in it, and with a conclusive nod that defeated all arguments said, “That’s happiness.”
Saturday Walk
Photos coming — had camera with me in walk to Esposito’s
Thirty-four mile week. Not bad.
Friday Walking
Thursday Walk
Wednesday Walk…Cold
Tuesday Walk
Monday Walk
Sunday Walk
Listening to the NYT Book Review podcast…the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts was talking about his poems with largely redacted sections. The poems were written using official documents, pulling the direct language from various actors.
One of the twins in The Grammarians composed poems in the same way.
This would be an awesome assignment for a history class. How do we make sense of a testimony or a police report or some other source? How might we render it as poetry?