One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus)
The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names. (E. O. Wilson, as cited by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal, Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson)
Monday, February 14, 2011
Valentine's Day Falls on a Sunday
February 14, 2010.Sunday.
Situation.Work all day today, don’t come home till after dark.No walk for Mway from me today.
Toward the end of 2009, I decided to start keeping a daily journal about taking my wife’s dog for a walk, as an exercise in defiance of a silence that had imposed itself around me (metaphysically, politically, culturally, psychologically – in short, in every way but literally, i.e. aurally). It was not my expectation to dispel the silence: metaphysically it was necessary for a sense of self in the first place; in the other ways it was too powerful for me to do anything about. I only hoped, by a wan gesture of protest, to mark the fact of its imposition, and to the extent that for an entire year I disciplined myself, after I took the dog for a walk (which I did almost every day), to sit down and write about it, I feel that I have been successful in fulfilling that hope. (For more, go to my introductory post of December 21, 2010, Walk to Mark the Silence.)
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