The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.”

— Wallace Stevens / “Of the Surafce of Things”

“Some time ago, I wrote an essay about napping outside how I would, for instance, see a carpet of moss in the forest or a cradle of rocks on a summit, and then feel inexplicably tired, lie down, and fall asleep quicker than I ever could in a bed. How, also, I’d awoken in a blizzard on a mountainside; another time in a graveyard with two men standing over me, asking if I was ‘practicing’; woke in a field with a mouse in my pocket eating the peanuts I carried. I felt a freedom to be in the wilderness that I know is not given to everyone.”

— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

“The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”

— Robinson Jeffers / “Rearmament”

“What is this secret power of trees that makes us so much healthier and happier? Why is it that we feel less stressed and have more energy just by walking in the forest?”

— Dr. Qing Li / Forest Bathing

“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.”

— Rebecca Solnit / Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. / Only the night is / wound up tight. / And ticking with unpaused breath.”

— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”

“A week of black, amnesiac sleep followed my homecoming. Exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.”

— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

What I’m Listening To:

“I got high I thought I saw an angel
But he was just a ghost
He was making wooden posts out of my family
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”

— Aldous Harding / “What If Birds Aren’t Singing They’re Screaming”