“Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs! Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through?"

Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

“Along this road
Going with no one
Autumn evening"

Basho

“I saw Werner once or twice after that. And he would phone me from fishing trips in Northumberland, where his brother-in-law was an Anglican parson. He was, I discovered, a compendium of contradictions: immensely tough yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual, not particularly well-adjusted to the strains of everyday life but functioning efficiently under extreme conditions.


He was also the only person with whom I could have a one-to-one conversation on what I would call the sacramental aspect of walking. He and I share a belief that walking is not simply therapeutic for oneself but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills. He sums up his position in a stern pronouncement: 'Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.' A striking example of this philosophy was his winter pilgrimage to see Lotte Eisner.

Lotte Eisner, film critic and associate of Fritz Lang in Berlin, had emigrated in the early 1930s to Paris, where she helped found the Cinémathèque. Much later, after seeing Werner's Signs of Life, she wrote to Lang in California, 'I have seen the work of a wonderful young German film-maker.' To which he replied, 'No. It is impossible.'

She was soon to become a guiding spirit of the new German cinema, giving young directors the benefit of her immense experience and, because she was Jewish, helping to re-establish continuity with a great tradition of film-making that had been shattered under Hitler.

Werner, I'm told, was her favourite. And in 1974, when he heard she was dying, he set out walking, through ice and snow, from Munich to Paris, confident that somehow he could walk away her sickness. By the time he reached her apartment she had recovered and went on to live another ten years."

Bruce Chatwin, What am I Doing Here?

"The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living."

R. H. Blyth

“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much."

John Muir

“The rain surrounded the cabin ... with a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside. Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen."

Thomas Merton

“Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?

This is the way of the orange gourd. 
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which
   the water pours all night and all day.
But the nature of man is not the nature of silence.
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments—
   we just manage it—
   sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
   and out the gate of the mouth.

We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar.
We are slow, and choosy.
This is the world."

-Mary Oliver, an excerpt from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud