A WALK IS A WALK IS A WALK

 

This is new to me but it appeared in the Harvard Crimson in February 1959, written by one Alice P Albright under the Headline ‘Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe: Most Brilliant Women Student.’  Stein died in 1946.

In the article, which (you may be surprised to hear) does not display precisely the same attitudes that are current in Harvard today, Albright writes,

‘As an undergraduate, Gertrude spent her leisure time in argument ("the air I breathe"), at the theatre and opera, and in taking long walks. To the end of her life, she liked walking; someone has said that she moved like a souped-up glacier, or like a mass of primordial mud. Though young ladies did not usually walk alone at night in those days, Gertrude knew she was safe. In fact, she promised to climb a tree at the approach of a masher--then drop on him and squash him!’

 

I can well believe that Gertrude Stein was a walker, but I’m less sure that she was much of a tree climber.

 

Some of those deeply unauthoritative online quotation sites have a few good lines from Stein.  Like this:

 

And this, even better, I think:

 

I’ve not been able to find sources for those two quotations but I did find this in Stein’s‘Mallorcan Stories’ which you can read in Geography and Plays.

 

‘A walk is not where the door shows a light, a walk is where there is a request to describe a description. A walk is when a place is not to be exchanged. There is a respect in every walk.

‘There is a result in every walk and the turn is there, the foot and the boot have that union that there can be slippers. Talking of the return of that shows that there will not be an opening. There is no reason to exchange the joke.’

 

Words to live by, words to walk with.