"Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands..."

"... of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost...."

From "Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot/In Japan, the simple act of walking has long been connected to working toward enlightenment" (NYT).

Every place worth living in or traveling to is best experienced by foot. That's what I say. If you want to feel that you are on a path toward enlightenment through walking, it's a bit insane to begin by flying half way around the word — racking up a massive regression — and needing to extricate yourself from or into complicated buildings.

I remember something about walking meditation from "Dharma Bums," the Jack Kerouac book I listened to — while walking — recently. I was searching the text for "walking," thinking I'd find the exactly right text, but I found this: "Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence."

"You don’t like that kind of beauty?"/"Good grief, what’s likeable in such snakiness?... In our true Russian understanding concerning a woman’s build..."

"... we keep to a type of our own, which we find much more suitable than modern-day frivolity. We don’t appreciate spindliness, true; we prefer that a woman stand not on long legs, but on sturdy ones, so that she doesn’t get tangled up, but rolls about everywhere like a ball and makes it, where a spindly-legged one will run and trip. We also don’t appreciate snaky thinness, but require that a woman be on the stout side, ample, because, though it’s not so elegant, it points to maternity in them. The brow of our real, pure Russian woman’s breed is more plump, more meaty, but then in that soft brow there’s more gaiety, more welcome. The same for the nose: ours have noses that aren’t hooked, but more like little pips, but this little pip itself, like it or not, is much more affable in family life than a dry, proud nose. But the eyebrows especially, the eyebrows open up the look of the face, and therefore it’s necessary that a woman’s eyebrows not scowl, but be opened out, archlike, for a man finds it more inviting to talk with such a woman, and she makes a different, more welcoming impression on everybody coming to the house. But modern taste, naturally, has abandoned this good type and approves of airy ephemerality in the female sex, only that’s completely useless.”

From "The Sealed Angel," an 1873 story by Nikolai Leskov, collected in "The Enchanted Wanderer." That's a character speaking, not the author's attitude.

That passage amused me, as I was listening to the audiobook and hiking in the mud in the Arb today. The story isn't much about women though, but about the Old Believers and their icons. Yesterday, I read the first story in the collection, "The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk."

My reading these stories has nothing to do with the woes unleashed by Russia in the world today. It is a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's book "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond" (which I mentioned a few days ago, here). That book begins: 

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film..."

"... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fishermen that if they found out anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichthyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the questions of what needs to be done and what is superfluous."

Said Ezra Pound in an interview with The Paris Review in 1962.

I found that as a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond," pp. 30-31:

"Is it possible to be nostalgic for the earlier version of a social-media interface?"

"No matter how often we use these platforms or how much we rely on them, we have no control over when they will change and what will be different. This conundrum makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s essay 'Unpacking My Library,' from 1931, in which he recounts removing his books from storage boxes and rearranging them on shelves. As he goes through the very physical process, he recalls where the books came from and what they symbolize to him, knowledge either obtained or aspired to. 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,' Benjamin wrote. 'Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.' In other words, we find our identities in the artifacts of the culture that we keep around us. But, when interfaces keep changing according to the profit incentives of vast technology corporations, it’s hard to feel that the things we publish and collect in our digital spaces really belong to us."

From "Why Twitter’s New Interface Makes Us Mad/A change like the new Chirp font might seem subtle. The effects are anything but" by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

I hadn't noticed the change in Twitter, so I was inclined to make fun of the loftiness here, but then I thought of the place that really is deeply intertwined with my sense of myself, this blog. For many years, I've kept the same format for the page that you see, but the page where I write changed dramatically a while back, and I lost a feeling of fluidity and belonging. I'm a writer in exile from a place I remember and romanticize. 

I wanted to read Walter Benjamin’s "Unpacking My Library," and, not finding the full text on line, I searched Amazon:

A colossal foot rasp! That will be good for my colossal foot:

"The 20th-century German philosopher (and victim of the Nazis) Walter Benjamin warned how fascism engages an 'aestheticization of politics'..."

"... where spectacle and transcendence provide a type of ecstasy for its adherents. Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against 'enemies of the people'; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. Critics of democracy often claim that it offers no similar sense of transcendence. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche castigated democracy as a system of 'quarantine mechanisms' for human desires, and as 'such they are … very boring.' If the individual unit of democracy is the citizen, authoritarian societies thrill to the Übermensch, the superman promising that 'I alone can fix it.' Yet I would argue that all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism — the rallies and crowds, the marching and military parades, the shouting demagogue promising his followers that they are superior — are wind and hot air. What fascism offers isn’t elevation but cheap transcendence, a counterfeit of meaning rather than the real thing. [Walt] Whitman understood that democracy wasn’t 'very boring' but rather a political system that could deliver on the promises that authoritarianism only pretended it would. For the poet, democracy wasn’t just a way of passing laws or a manner of organizing a government; democracy was a method of transcendence in its own right."

From "Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020/With our democracy in crisis, the poet and prophet of the American ideal should be our guide" by Ed Simon (in the NYT).

What's so bad about boring? Some things — important things — you want to be boring (for example: the operation of your internal organs). I'd prefer a boring government. I don't like people getting all emotional about politics. Rather than pumping up the pro-democracy propaganda and rhetoric, why don't we give respect to boredom. Let politics be boring so our own individual life engages our interest.

I have a tag "I'm for Boring." I started that tag here (in 2014). Reacting to a WaPo columnist who fretted about low turnout in elections, I said:

Boring!... I mean hooray for boredom in politics.