"William Wordsworth swore by walking, as did Virginia Woolf. So did William Blake."

"Thomas Mann assured us, 'Thoughts come clearly while one walks.' J.K. Rowling observed that there is 'nothing like a nighttime stroll to give you ideas,' while the turn-of-the-20th-century novelist Elizabeth von Arnim concluded that walking 'is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.' And ask any deep thinker about the benefits of what Bill Bryson calls the 'tranquil tedium' walking elicits. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted, 'There is something about walking that animates and activates my ideas.' Even the resolutely pessimistic Friedrich Nietzsche had to give it up for a good saunter when he allowed, 'All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.'"

From "Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking" by the writer Andrew McCarthy (NYT).

My second post today about walking. But that's how it goes. Things come up when they come up, and I blog them as I encounter them, as if there's so such thing as saving them for a better place in some more curated sequence of posts. No, we must stumble ever forward.

Now, just on the topic of Wordsworth's walks, may I strongly recommend this episode of Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast, "Wordsworth Revisited: The Leech-Gatherer"? Here's the poem it's about, "Resolution and Independence."

And here's McCarthy's book, "Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain" (Amazon). How old was the son? 19.