Why I Walk An Article by Chris Arnade walkingtheworld.substack.com On my first day I literally walk across the city, to the extent it can be done…The next day I do another cross town walk, but in a different direction, filling in the blanks from the prior day’s walk. Then, over the next week(s), I walk between 10 to 20 miles per day, picking and choosing from what I have seen before, highlighting what I like, what I want to know more about, refining the path, till by the end of my trip, I have a daily route that is roughly the same. While that is certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content. walkinghumanitycities
A passive beauty of right structure The human maker, working in unself-conscious matter, receives no worship from his creatures, since their will is no part of his material; he can only receive the response of their nature, and he is alone in fault if that response is not forthcoming. If he tortures his material, if the stone looks unhappy when he has wrought it into a pattern alien to its own nature, if his writing is an abuse of language, his music a succession of unmeaning intervals, the helpless discomfort of his material universe is a reproach to him alone; similarly, if he respects and interprets the integrity of his material, the seemliness of the ordered work proclaims his praise, and his only, without will, but in a passive beauty of right structure. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker The Web's Grain material