![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() To mosey through the woods is to mosey along a road of rakes toward the moldy basement of my mind, where things aren’t right. (My psychiatrist has in fact advised me to stop taking walks alone in the woods and instead find a more social form of exercise.) But pines only appeal to me when I pine for them in the city, especially when riding the subway beside a man who flosses his teeth and flicks plaque on my cheek. Some people say they like to wander the woods because it helps them get out of their heads. ![]() If thoughts are rakes, which they aren’t but no matter, then introspecting in the woods is like stepping on a rake and having it smash my face, then stepping on another rake and having it smash my face and so forth. Unlike Hamsun, I find it painful to introspect, especially in the woods. Knut Hamsun, the misanthropic Norwegian writer who in 1920 won the Nobel Prize for literature and who later suicided his reputation by eulogizing Hitler, renders the joy of introspecting alone in the woods so convincingly that sometimes, during bad moods, I wish I understood firsthand how it feels to hate other people (without becoming a Nazi) as much as he did, purely so that I could enjoy solitude. ![]()
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