I read Wordsworth’s book-length autobiographical poem The Prelude twice in order to write a chapter of my book on walking. I was so immersed in his language—unhurried graciousness, elaborate and sometimes inverted syntax, circumlocutory ways of saying things—that my casual remarks to strangers and check-out clerks were met with baffled looks. There’s a benefit to being untethered from your own time. I think I gained a sense of how differently constituted the idea of being human, the purpose of life, the expectations and desires had been even a generation or two ago, let alone half a millennium
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