Word: toads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Toad simultaneously loved walking as an escape from thought, a way of setting the world itself astir, like a cycloramic dream, so that it flowed through his eye to his mind at the speed that suits the total creature best -- all higher speeds being a mere greed for frivolous accelerations, for wind in the face...
...best walking is a liberation, and a way of thinking. A creature like Toad is not a tree, but is designed to move across earth's surface, perpendicular to gravity and companioned by time. Somehow walking, thought Toad in his mellower moments, makes time a passage that is not only bearable but also sweet and festooned with an everlastingly changing array of scenery...
...many kinds of walking did Toad savor. Beach walking took him along the edge of eternity. Night walking carried him through another mysterious fluid, darkness. Walking populated his solitude with multitudes of fancies and inner images, and let his mind roam up and down in time. Yet walking in the city also gave him sometimes an ecstatic solitude -- a paradoxical apartness and serenity...
Conversation, Toad thought, was best when walking, since talk itself is an ambling. Toad even talked better to himself when walking -- though if he moved his lips when doing it, he looked like a street crazy. It was at last in the walking that Toad's soul, he found, was most at rest...
...Toad yearned always for the wild walking, of course. But he sighed the sigh of resignation. The whole world now is a beaten track. Even if Toad went to the moon for a hike, he would find footprints there...