(Roughly) Daily

L. M. Sacasas in admiration of the ambulatory…

A few weeks back I shared a few lines from Kierkegaard about the virtues of walking. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” Kierkegaard advised a friend in despair. “Every day,” he went on to say, “I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” This struck me as good counsel.

Since then, I’ve serendipitously encountered a handful of similar meditations on the value of walking, so I’ve taken that as sign to briefly gather some of these together and offer them to you, chiefly because they collectively remind us that there is a scale of activity and experience appropriate to the human animal and things tend to go well for us when we mind it…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The Ambling Mind,” from @LMSacasas.

(Image above: source)

* Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

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As we wander, we might spare a thought for Francisco de Sá de Miranda; he died on this date in 1558. A poet of the Portuguese Renaissance, he introduced the sonnet, the elegy, the ottava rima, and relevantly to the piece above, the eclogue to Portuguese letters, adapting the Portuguese language to the Italian hendecasyllable verse. These forms were later used by many Portuguese poets including Luís Vaz de Camões, the Portuguese language’s greatest poet.

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