If it hadn't been for Sara's reference to The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux, I might well not have spotted the review of the book in the International Herald Tribune. In it I learnt, amongst other things, that Wordsworth walked about 180,000 miles, or 290,000 kilometres in his lifetime. That seems an awful lot. Assuming that he walked at 5 kilometres per hour, he spent 58,000 hours walking. Wordsworth lived for 701,000 hours in all. When you think that most people spend a third of their life sleeping - considerably more in my case - plus a considerable amount of time doing the washing-up, making the bed, shopping and tending to the garden, that doesn't seem to leave a lot of time left for poetry.
UNLESS PERHAPS WORDSWORTH COMPOSED HIS POEMS WHILST HE WAS OUT WALKING? We cannot rule out the possibility, of course, but could he, in that case, have managed as much as 5 KPH? It seems unlikely. And besides, how would he have remembered what he had composed if he did not stop from to time to jot down his thoughts in a notebook?
OR UNLESS AGAIN HE SPENT A LOT OF TIME NOT SO MUCH WALKING AS PACING? That would make a crazy sort of sense.
UNLESS PERHAPS WORDSWORTH COMPOSED HIS POEMS WHILST HE WAS OUT WALKING? We cannot rule out the possibility, of course, but could he, in that case, have managed as much as 5 KPH? It seems unlikely. And besides, how would he have remembered what he had composed if he did not stop from to time to jot down his thoughts in a notebook?
OR UNLESS AGAIN HE SPENT A LOT OF TIME NOT SO MUCH WALKING AS PACING? That would make a crazy sort of sense.
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