The Promenade Is A Special

If Sorrow And Beauty Are All Tied Up Together, Then Perhaps Maturity Brings With It Not What Nabhan Calls Abstraction, But An Aesthetic Sense That Partially Redeems The Losses Time Brings And Finds Beauty In The Faraway.

In Great Cities, Spaces As Well As Places Are Designed And Built: Walking, Witnessing, Being In Public, Are As Much Part Of The Design And Purpose As Is Being Inside To Eat, Sleep, Make Shoes Or Love Or Music. The Word Citizen Has To Do With Cities, And The Ideal City Is Organized Around Citizenship -- Around Participation In Public Life.

The Positive Emotions That Arise In...unpromising Circumstances Demonstrate That Social Ties And Meaningful Work Are Deeply Desired, Readily Improvised, And Intensely Rewarding. The Very Structure Of Our Economy And Society Prevent These Goals From Being Achieved.

Every Woman Knows What I'm Talking About. It’s The Presumption That Makes It Hard, At Times, For Any Woman In Any Field; That Keeps Women From Speaking Up And From Being Heard When They Dare; That Crushes Young Women Into Silence By Indicating, The Way Harassment On The Street Does, That This Is Not Their World. It Trains Us In Self-doubt And Self-limitation Just As It Exercises Men’s Unsupported Overconfidence.

They Are All Beasts Of Burden In A Sense, ' Thoreau Once Remarked Of Animals, 'made To Carry Some Portion Of Our Thoughts.' Animals Are The Old Language Of The Imagination; One Of The Ten Thousand Tragedies Of Their Disappearance Would Be A Silencing Of This Speech.