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For Many Years, I Have Been Moved By The Blue At The Far Edge Of What Can Be Seen, That Color Of Horizons, Of Remote Mountain Ranges, Of Anything Far Away. The Color Of That Distance Is The Color Of An Emotion, The Color Of Solitude And Of Desire, The Color Of There Seen From Here, The Color Of Where You Are Not. And The Color Of Where You Can Never Go.

-Rebecca Solnit

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For Many Years, I

Rebecca Solnit

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For Many Years, I Have Been Moved By The Blue At The Far Edge Of What Can Be Seen, That Color Of Horizons, Of Remote Mountain Ranges, Of Anything Far Away. The Color Of That Distance Is The Color Of An Emotion, The Color Of Solitude And Of Desire, The Color Of There Seen From Here, The Color Of Where You Are Not. And The Color Of Where You Can Never Go.

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Mountain Ranges

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Growing Up North Of San Francisco, I Immersed Myself In The Local Landscape And In Books About Native Americans, Cowboys, And Pioneers That Seemed To Ground Me In It, But To Pursue Culture In Those Days Meant Being Spun Around Until Dizzy And Then Pushed East.

Native American

Sometimes It Seems That The Fate Of The World Is Decided Entirely In The Ether Of Electronic Communications And Corporate Backroom Deals.

In Great Cities, Spaces As Well As Places Are Designed And Built: Walking, Witnessing, Being In Public, Are As Much Part Of The Design And Purpose As Is Being Inside To Eat, Sleep, Make Shoes Or Love Or Music. The Word Citizen Has To Do With Cities, And The Ideal City Is Organized Around Citizenship -- Around Participation In Public Life.

A Contrarian At Heart, I Am Often Guided By What I Disagree With And Don't Want.

Cities Have Always Offered Anonymity, Variety, And Conjunction, Qualities Best Basked In By Walking: One Does Not Have To Go Into The Bakery Or The Fortune-teller's, Only To Know That One Might. A City Always Contains More Than Any Inhabitant Can Know, And A Great City Always Makes The Unknown And The Possible Spurs To The Imagination.

Too Many Of Us Seem Far Too Fond Of Narratives Of Our Powerlessness, Maybe Because Powerlessness Lets Us Off The Hook... But We Don't Need Everyone On Board; We Don't Need One Magic Person In Office; We Need Ourselves. To Act. It's The Wind, Not The Weathervanes.

I Often Think That The Reason Capitalism Hasn't Completely Destroyed Everything Is That A Huge Amount Of Anti-capitalist Endeavor Goes On, From Labors Of Love, Nurture, Friendship, And Barter To Gift Economies And Different Kinds Of Exchanges, Not Just One Alternate Model But A Whole Host Of Other Ways In Which We Engage With Each Other And With The World That Aren't Financial And Debt-based.

Every Woman Who Appears Wrestles With The Forces That Would Have Her Disappear. She Struggles With The Forces That Would Tell Her Story For Her, Or Write Her Out Of The Story ... The Ability To Tell Your Own Story, In Words Or Images, Is Already A Victory, Already A Revolt.

Places Matter. Their Rules, Their Scale, Their Design Include Or Exclude Civil Society, Pedestrianism, Equality, Diversity (economic And Otherwise), Understanding Of Where Water Comes From And Garbage Goes, Consumption Or Conservation. They Map Our Lives.

While A Lot Of People Want To Join The Left To React Against The Mainstream Or Right, I In Many Ways React Against The Left - Not A Lot Of Its Fundamental Commitments, But Its Often Dismal Tone, Righteousness, Defeatism, Etc.

Every Walker Is A Guard On Patrol To Protect The Ineffable.

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Despair Is Easy, Or At Least Low Cost.

Perhaps It’s That You Can’t Go Back In Time, But You Can Return To The Scenes Of A Love, Of A Crime, Of Happiness, And Of A Fatal Decision; The Places Are What Remain, Are What You Can Possess, Are What Is Immortal. They Become The Tangible Landscape Of Memory, The Places That Made You, And In Some Way You Too Become Them. They Are What You Can Possess And In The End What Possesses You.

Hope Is Not Like A Lottery Ticket You Can Sit On The Sofa And Clutch, Feeling Lucky.... Hope Is An Ax You Break Down Doors With In An Emergency.

Stories Are Compasses And Architecture, We Navigate By Them, We Build Our Sanctuaries And Our Prisons Out Of Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of A World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice.

Everywhere People Are At Work To Build A Better World In Which We - And Some Of The Beauty Of This World - Will Be Guaranteed To Survive. Everywhere They Are At War With The Forces Threatening Us And The Planet.

To Write Is To Carve A New Path Through The Terrain Of The Imagination, Or To Point Out New Features On A Familiar Route. To Read Is To Travel Through That Terrain With The Author As A Guide-- A Guide One Might Not Always Agree With Or Trust, But Who Can At Least Be Counted On To Take One Somewhere.

For [jane Austen And The Readers Of Pride And Prejudice], As For Mr. Darcy, [elizabeth Bennett's] Solitary Walks Express The Independence That Literally Takes The Heroine Out Of The Social Sphere Of The Houses And Their Inhabitants, Into A Larger, Lonelier World Where She Is Free To Think: Walking Articulates Both Physical And Mental Freedom.

There Are Infinite Shades Of Grey. Writing Often Appears So Black And White.

Black And White

For Me, Before I Learned How To Read I Was Really Interested In Story And In Landscape And Nature. I Decided To Become A Writer Almost As Soon As I Learned To Read.

Solitude In The City Is About The Lack Of Other People Or Rather Their Distance Beyond A Door Or Wall, But In Remote Places It Isn’t An Absence But The Presence Of Something Else, A Kind Of Humming Silence In Which Solitude Seems As Natural To Your Species As To Any Other, Words Strange Rocks You May Or May Not Turn Over.

We Have Only The Language For Fun And Miserable, And Maybe We Need Language For Deep And Shallow, Meaningful And Meaningless.

Before Writers Are Writers They Are Readers, Living In Books, Through Books, In The Lives Of Others That Are Also The Heads Of Others, In That Act That Is So Intimate And Yet So Alone.

A Lone Walker Is Both Present And Detached, More Than An Audience But Less Than A Participant. Walking Assuages Or Legitimizes This Alienation.

Think Of Civil Society And The State As Joined In A Marriage Of Necessity. You Already Know Who The Wife Is, The One Who Is Supposed To Love, Cherish And Obey: That's Civil Society. Think Of The State As The Domineering Husband Who Expects To Have A Monopoly On Power, On Violence, On Planning And Policymaking.

We Know Less When We Erroneously Think We Know Than When We Recognize That We Don't.

Thinking Is Generally Thought Of As Doing Nothing In A Production - Oriented Society And Doing Nothing Is Hard To Do. It's Best Done By Disguising It As Doing Something And The Something Closest To Doing Nothing Is Walking.

Credibility Is A Basic Survival Tool.

It Had Come To Me Not In A Sudden Epiphany But With A Gradual Sureness, A Sense Of Meaning Like A Sense Of Place. When You Give Yourself To Places, They Give You Yourself Back; The More One Comes To Know Them, The More One Seeds Them With The Invisible Crop Of Memories And Associations That Will Be Waiting For You When You Come Back, While New Places Offer Up New Thoughts, New Possibilities. Exploring The World Is One Of The Best Ways Of Exploring The Mind, And Walking Travels Both Terrains.

Exploring The World

The Process Of Transformation Consists Mostly Of Decay.

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Previous Technologies Have Expanded Communication. But The Last Round May Be Contracting It. The Eloquence Of Letters Has Turned Into The Unnuanced Spareness Of Texts; The Intimacy Of Phone Conversations Has Turned Into The Missed Signals Of Mobile Phone Chat ... ('you're Breaking Up' Is The Cry Of Our Time).

I'm A Big Fan Of The Vigor Of Civil Society, Political Engagement, And Public Life In Many Parts Of Latin America.

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I Think That Walking Down The Middle Of The Street With Several Thousand People Who Share Your Deepest Beliefs Is One Of The Best Ways To Take A Walk.

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Kindness And Gentleness Never Had A Gender, And Neither Did Empathy.

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Some Things We Have Only As Long As They Remain Lost, Some Things Are Not Lost Only So Long As They Are Distant.

Beauty Is Often Spoken Of As Though It Only Stirs Lust Or Admiration, But The Most Beautiful People Are So In A Way That Makes Them Look Like Destiny Or Fate Or Meaning, The Heroes Of A Remarkable Story.

We Treat Desire As A Problem To Be Solved, Address What Desire Is For And Focus On That Something And How To Acquire It Rather Than On The Nature And The Sensation Of Desire, Though Often It Is The Desire Between Us And The Object Of Desire That Fills The Space In Between With The Blue Of Longing.

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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.

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To Be Hopeful Means To Be Uncertain About The Future, To Be Tender Toward Possibilities, To Be Dedicated To Change All The Way Down To The Bottom Of Your Heart.

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The Famous Zen Parable About The Master For Whom, Before His Studies, Mountains Were Only Mountains, But During His Studies Mountains Were No Longer Mountains, And Afterward Mountains Were Again Mountains Could Be Interpreted As An Alleory About [the Perpetual Paradox That When One Is Closest To A Destination One Is Also The Farthest).

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If Sorrow And Beauty Are All Tied Up Together, Then Perhaps Maturity Brings With It Not What Nabhan Calls Abstraction, But An Aesthetic Sense That Partially Redeems The Losses Time Brings And Finds Beauty In The Faraway.

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Perhaps Walking Is Best Imagined As An 'indicator Species,' To Use An Ecologist's Term. An Indicator Species Signifies The Health Of An Ecosystem, And Its Endangerment Or Diminishment Can Be An Early Warning Sign Of Systemic Trouble. Walking Is An Indicator Species For Various Kinds Of Freedom And Pleasures: Free Time, Free And Alluring Space, And Unhindered Bodies.

The Stars We Are Given. The Constellations We Make. That Is To Say, Stars Exist In The Cosmos, But Constellations Are The Imaginary Lines We Draw Between Them, The Readings We Give The Sky, The Stories We Tell.

I See Disaster Everywhere; I Also […] See Generosity And Resistance Everywhere.

An Aptitude Test Established Architecture As An Alternative [career]. But What Decided The Matter For [teddy Cruz] Was The Sight Of A Fourth-year Architecture Student Sitting At His Desk At A Window, Drawing And Nursing A Cup Of Coffee As Rain Fell Outside. 'i Don't Know, I Just Liked The Idea Of Having This Relationship To The Paper And The Adventure Of Imagining The Spaces. That Was The First Image That Captured Me.

In A Sense The Car Has Become A Prosthetic, And Though Prosthetics Are Usually For Injured Or Missing Limbs, The Auto-prosthetic Is For A Conceptually Impaired Body Or A Body Impaired By The Creation Of A World That Is No Longer Human In Scale.

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Never Turn Down An Adventure Without A Really Good Reason.

A Path Is A Prior Interpretation Of The Best Way To Traverse A Landscape.

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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.

Walking, Ideally, Is A State In Which The Mind, The Body, And The World Are Aligned.

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Walking Itself Is The Intentional Act Closest To The Unwilled Rhythms Of The Body, To Breathing And The Beating Of The Heart. It Strikes A Delicate Balance Between Working And Idling, Being And Doing. It Is A Bodily Labor That Produces Nothing But Thoughts, Experiences, Arrivals.

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I'm Grateful That, After An Early Life Of Being Silenced, Sometimes Violently, I Grew Up To Have A Voice, Circumstances That Will Always Bind Me To The Rights Of The Voiceless.

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Exploring The World

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No One Is Born A Writer; Literacy Is A Peculiar Mode Of Being, But I Was All About Stories From A Very Early Age, Before Reading.

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To Hope Is To Give Yourself To The Future - And That Commitment To The Future Is What Makes The Present Inhabitable.

Books Are Solitudes In Which We Meet.

Leave The Door Open For The Unknown, The Door Into The Dark. That’s Where The Most Important Things Come From, Where You Yourself Came From, And Where You Will Go.

The Power Of Large Corporations Is Still A Scourge On The Earth, But At Least The Arguments Supporting Them Are Undermined Now.

The Art Is Not One Of Forgetting But Letting Go. And When Everything Else Is Gone, You Can Be Rich In Loss.

A Procession Is A Participants' Journey, While A Parade Is A Performance With An Audience.

I Was Fifteen, And When I Picture Myself Then, I See Flames Shooting Up, See Myself Falling Off The Edge Of The World, And Am Amazed I Survived Not The Outside World But The Inside One.

Walking Shares With Making And Working That Crucial Element Of Engagement Of The Body And The Mind With The World, Of Knowing The World Through The Body And The Body Through The World.

Walking Allows Us To Be In Our Bodies And In The World Without Being Made Busy By Them.

A Book Is A Heart That Only Beats In The Chest Of Another.

Language Is Like A Road, It Cannot Be Perceived All At Once Because It Unfolds In Time, Whether Heard Or Read. This Narrative Or Temporal Element Has Made Writing And Walking Resemble Each Other.

All Gardening Is Landscape Painting,' Said Alexander Pope.

Landscape Painting

When Someone Doesn't Show Up, The People Who Wait Sometimes Tell Stories About What Might Have Happened And Come To Half Believe The Desertion, The Abduction, The Accident. Worry Is A Way To Pretend That You Have Knowledge Or Control Over What You Don't--and It Surprises Me, Even In Myself, How Much We Prefer Ugly Scenarios To The Pure Unknown. Perhaps Fantasy Is What You Fill Up Maps With Rather Than Saying That They Too Contain The Unknown.

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Walking Articulates Both Physical And Mental Freedom.

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We Fly; We Dream In Darkness; We Devour Heaven In Bites Too Small To Be Measured.

Violence Doesn't Have A Race, A Class, A Religion, Or A Nationality, But It Does Have A Gender.

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Space--as Landscape, Terrain, Spectacle, Experience--has Vanished.

The Subject Of Walking Is, In Some Sense, About How We Invest Universal Acts With Particular Meanings. Like Eating Or Breathing, It Can Be Invested With Wildly Different Cultural Meanings, From The Erotic To The Spiritual, From The Revolutionary To The Artistic.

What Gets Called 'the Sixties' Left A Mixed Legacy And A Lot Of Divides. But It Opened Everything To Question, And What Seems The Most Fundamental And Most Pervasive In All The Ensuing Changes Is The Loss Of Faith In Authority: The Authority Of Government, Of Science, Of Patriarchy, Of Progress, Of Capitalism, Of Violence, Of Whiteness.

As For Me, The Grounds Of My Hope Have Always Been That History Is Wilder Than Our Imagination Of It And That The Unexpected Shows Up Far More Regularly Than We Ever Dream.

If You Look At A Lot Of Traditional Societies, They're All Organized Along What We Might Call Anarchist Guidelines, But It's Not Like The Zapatistas Were Reading European Social Theory.

Sometimes A Few Passionate People Change The World; Sometimes They Start A Mass Movement And Millions Do.

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.

There Was An Assumption That Aerial Bombing Of Civilians In World War Ii Would Cause Fragile, Working-class People To Basically Have Nervous Breakdowns And It Would Paralyze The State. That Was The Logic Of Aerial Bombing. In Fact, It Doesn't Happen At All, But The Logic Behind Aerial Bombing Has Never Stopped, Even Though It Never Demoralizes, Terrorizes, Or Paralyzes A Population.

If Gold Has Been Prized Because It Is The Most Inert Element, Changeless And Incorruptible, Water Is Prized For The Opposite Reason -- Its Fluidity, Mobility, Changeability That Make It A Necessity And A Metaphor For Life Itself. To Value Gold Over Water Is To Value Economy Over Ecology, That Which Can Be Locked Up Over That Which Connects All Things.

You Get Lost Out Of A Desire To Be Lost. But In The Place Called Lost Strange Things Are Found.

...the Questions A Photographer Raises May Be More Profound Than The Answers The Medium Permits.

I Was Not Going To Surrender To The Status Quo And Corporate Insistence That Ordinary People Have No Power And Influence.

[in Mountaineering, If] We Look For Private Experience Rather Than Public History, Even Getting To The Top Becomes An Optional Narrative Rather Than The Main Point, And Those Who Only Wander In High Places Become Part Of The Story.

The Oil Corporations Spend A Lot Of Money To Get, Say, The Tar Sands Pipeline Through, But Nobody's - You Know, There Are Definitely Environmentalists Being Paid - But A Lot Of People Are Acting For Something Other Than Financial Compensation. So If The Tar Sands Pipeline Doesn't Get Made, It's Because A Huge Amount Of People Are Doing Something That Doesn't Involve Remuneration, Money, Etc., Because We're Not Actually The Self-interested Financial Instruments That Economists Like To Imagine We Are.

You Don't Have To Be A Preacher To Talk About What Matters, And You Don't Have To Drop The Pleasures Of Style

Sense Of Place Is The Sixth Sense, An Internal Compass And Map Made By Memory And Spatial Perception Together.

For Me The Insurrectionary Possibilities Of Disaster Are What Make Them Really Interesting And Sometimes Positive - Mexico City's Big 1985 Earthquake Brought A Lot Of Positive, Populist, Anti-institutional Social Change.

I Don't Think My Work Has To Be Loved By Everyone, And It's Loved By Enough People That I'm Grateful And Able To Keep Going.

What Is Kind Of Beautiful About Katrina Is That Even Though The Media And Officials Are Working Hard At Telling Us Everyone In New Orleans Was A Monster, In The Immediate Aftermath More Than 200,000 People Invite Displaced Strangers Into Their Homes Through Hurricanehousing.org And An Uncounted Horde Go To New Orleans And The Gulf Coast To Give, To Love, To Be In Solidarity, And To Rebuild.

Italian Cities Have Long Been Held Up As Ideals, Not Least By New Yorkers And Londoners Enthralled By The Ways Their Architecture Gives Beauty And Meaning To Everyday Acts.

People Are Actually Very Good At Being Communists In The Sense That They Instantly Abandon Capitalism, That They Love These Relationships Of Mutual Aid, Because The Astonishing Thing About Disasters Is That People Are Often Weirdly Joyous In Them, Because They've Recovered A Sense Of Agency, A Sense Of Power, Etc.

The Battle With Men Who Explain Things Has Trampled Down Many Women - Of My Generation, Of The Up-and-coming Generation We Need So Badly, Here And In Pakistan And Bolivia And Java, Not To Speak Of The Countless Women Who Came Before Me And Were Not Allowed Into The Laboratory, Or The Library, Or The Conversation, Or The Revolution, Or Even The Category Called Human.

How Do You Calculate Upon The Unforeseen? It Seems To Be An Art Of Recognizing The Role Of The Unforeseen, Of Keeping Your Balance Amid Surprises, Of Collaborating With Chance, Of Recognizing That There Are Some Essential Mysteries In The World And Thereby A Limit To Calculation, To Plan, To Control. To Calculate On The Unforeseen Is Perhaps Exactly The Paradoxical Operation That Life Most Requires Of Us.

Revolution Is As Unpredictable As An Earthquake And As Beautiful As Spring. Its Coming Is Always A Surprise, But Its Nature Should Not Be.

When I Think About, Say, 1995, Or Whever The Last Moment Was Before Most Of Us Were On The Internet And Had Mobile Phones, It Seems Like A Hundred Years Ago. ... Time Passed In Fairly Large Units, Or At Least Not In Milliseconds And Constant Updates. A Few Hours Wasn't Such A Long Time To Go Between Moments Of Contact With Your Work, Your People Or Your Trivia.

Getting Lost Was Not A Matter Of Geography So Much As Identity, A Passionate Desire, Even An Urgent Need, To Become No One And Anyone, To Shake Off The Shackles That Remind You Who You Are, Who Others Think You Are.

Passionate Desire

Modern Life Is Moving Faster Than The Speed Of Thought, Or Thoughtfulness.

There Are Fossils Of Seashells High In The Himalayas; What Was And What Is Are Different Things.

It Turns Out That We're Actually Capable Of Something Other Than Neoliberalism And Actually We're Really Capable Of Enjoying Ourselves More Than We Do Under Neoliberalism. It Feels That If Neoliberalism Is First About Privatizing Desire And Imagination Before The Economy, Then We're In This Process Of Publicizing It Again.

For Me, Being In A Car Or On An Airplane Is Like Being In Limbo. It's This Dead Zone Between Two Places. But To Walk, You're Some Place That's Already Interesting. You're Not Just Between Places. Things Are Happening.

Writing Is Saying To No One And To Everyone The Things It Is Not Possible To Say To Someone.

To Lose Yourself: A Voluptuous Surrender, Lost In Your Arms, Lost To The World, Utterly Immersed In What Is Present So That Its Surroundings Fade Away. In Benjamin’s Terms, To Be Lost Is To Be Fully Present, And To Be Fully Present Is To Be Capable Of Being In Uncertainty And Mystery.

The Oil Dinosaurs Want To Win So Badly In My Home State Because What Happens Here Matters Everywhere. The Nation Often Follows Where California Goes.

Revolution Is A Phase, A Mood, Like Spring, And Just As Spring Has Its Buds And Showers, So Revolution Has Its Ebullience, Its Bravery, Its Hope, And Its Solidarity. Some Of These Things Pass.

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.

How Will You Go About Finding That Thing The Nature Of Which Is Totally Unknown To You?" (plato) 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. Love, Wisdom, Grace, Inspiration- How Do You Go About Finding These Things That Are In Some Ways About Extending The Boundaries Of The Self Into Unknown Territory, About Becoming Someone Else?

The Earth We Evolved To Inhabit Is Turning Into Something More Turbulent And Unreliable At A Pace Too Fast For Most Living Things To Adapt To.

A Labyrinth Is A Symbolic Journey . . . But It Is A Map We Can Really Walk On, Blurring The Difference Between Map And World.

Many People Nowadays Live In A Series Of Interiors...disconnected From Each Other. On Foot Everything Stays Connected, For While Walking One Occupies The Spaces Between Those Interiors In The Same Way One Occupies Those Interiors. One Lives In The Whole World Rather Than In Interiors Built Up Against It.

Lost Really Has Two Disparate Meanings. Losing Things Is About The Familiar Falling Away, Getting Lost Is About The Unfamiliar Appearing.

I Grew Up With Landscape As A Recourse, With The Possibility Of Exiting The Horizontal Realm Of Social Relations For A Vertical Alignment With Earth And Sky, Matter And Spirit. Vast Open Spaces Speak Best To This Craving, The Spaces I Myself First Found In The Desert And Then In The Western Grasslands.

For Many Years, I Have Been Moved By The Blue At The Far Edge Of What Can Be Seen, That Color Of Horizons, Of Remote Mountain Ranges, Of Anything Far Away. The Color Of That Distance Is The Color Of An Emotion, The Color Of Solitude And Of Desire, The Color Of There Seen From Here, The Color Of Where You Are Not. And The Color Of Where You Can Never Go.

Mountain Ranges

We Are Often In Two Places At Once. In Fact We Are Usually In At Least Two Places And Occasionally The Contrast Is Evident....here, Most Often, Is Nothing More Than The Best Perspective To Contemplate There.

A Restlessness Has Seized Hold Of Many Of Us, A Sense That We Should Be Doing Something Else, No Matter What We Are Doing, Or Doing At Least Two Things At Once, Or Going To Check Some Other Medium. It's An Anxiety About Keeping Up, About Not Being Left Out Or Getting Behind.

There Is No One As Dangerous As He Or She Who Has Nothing To Lose.

Nothing To Lose

As I Started To Pursue The Subject More Deeply I Realized That Walking Was This Wonderful Meandering Path Through Everything I Was Already Interested In - Gender Politics, Public Space And Urban Life, Demonstrations And Parades And Marches. The Relationship Between Walking And Thinking And Between The Mind And The Body.

I Sometimes Wonder What Those Of Us Who Are Writers Would Become In A Nonliterary Culture - Storytellers? Hermits?

Sure, You Can Say Nuclear Power Is Somewhat Less Carbon-intensive Than Burning Fossil Fuels For Energy; Beating Your Children To Death With A Club Will Prevent Them From Getting Hit By A Car. Ravaging The Earth By One Irreparable Means Is Not A Sensible Way To Prevent It From Being Destroyed By Another. There Are Alternatives. We Should Choose Them And Use Them.

There Is So Much Information That Our Ability To Focus On Any Piece Of It Is Interrupted By Other Information, So That We Bathe In Information But Hardly Absorb Or Analyse It. Data Are Interrupted By Other Data Before We've Thought About The First Round, And Contemplating Three Streams Of Data At Once May Be A Way To Think About None Of Them.

I Roam Around A Lot In My Territory, But What I Learn At One End Inflects And Opens Up My Understanding At The Other.

Time Itself Is Our Tragedy And Most Of Us Are Fighting Some Kind Of War Against It.

Musing Takes Place In A Kind Of Meadowlands Of The Imagination, A Part Of The Imagination That Has Not Yet Been Plowed, Developed, Or Put To Any Immediately Practical Use…time Spent There Is Not Work Time, Yet Without That Time The Mind Becomes Sterile, Dull, Domesticated. The Fight For Free Space — For Wilderness And Public Space — Must Be Accompanied By A Fight For Free Time To Spend Wandering In That Space.

Las Vegas Suggests That The Thirst For Places, For Cities And Gardens And Wilderness, Is Unslaked, That People Will Still Seek Out The Experience Of Wandering About In The Open Air To Examine The Architecture, The Spectacles, And The Stuff For Sale, Will Still Hanker After Surprises And Strangers. That The City As A Whole Is One Of The Most Pedestrian-unfriendly Places In The World Suggests Something Of The Problems To Be Faced, But That Its Attraction Is A Pedestrian Oasis Suggests The Possibility Of Recovering The Spaces In Which Walking Is Viable.

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Marjane Satrapi

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