in defense of rambling #sol18

Once again I'm not sure what I'll be blogging about -- rambling until I find a subject or one finds me. Until then, it's another ramble, or as Thoreau would have it, a saunter. This country lane looks like promising. So many words for walking in different modes and settings -- saunter, flâner, promenade, ramble, stroll, pasear, wander, amble and more -- all walking.

Thinking about my verbal ramble led me to flânerie and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, then to Rousseau's Promenades and finally to Thoreau and "Walking." Flânerie and perhaps even the promenade are more urban -- less Yuma and small town appropriate than Henry David Thoreau's "Walking," published in The Atlantic, June 1862.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade

Soon I expect to return to my daily walking in whatever manner suits.

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Two Writing Teachers host a weekly Tuesday and an annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge (SOLSC). This is the 11th SOLSC. During March, participants write daily blog posts, share them on the TWT blog and comment on three or more blog posts by other participants. Sharing posts and comments, central both weekly and month long challenges, is at the core of this writing community. Read more of today's blog posts here.