Mimi’s Reviews > The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot > Status Update

More playful use of language: “This was her version of Decartes’ cogito: I walk therefore I am. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am,’ the beat of the placed and lifted foot.

The author’s descriptions of his travels and the people he encounters are beautiful, but also
impenetrable at times. Here’s a characteristically beguiling line: “Steve’s affection for the boulder and its world was cold and hard and tender, a longing simultaneously for distance and for enclosure: a paradox understandable to anyone who has ever been in a certain kind of love.”