Ralph Waldo Emerson, not in a universal eyeball kind of mood— 

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”

via Poetic Outlaws

In an essay I've just seen at The New Yorker,  A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump, Jill Lepore describes what she calls her "doomscrolling methadone," the way she used to get through Trump's Hundred Days. it sounds as if Lepore merely stumbled on the technique. I'm still jealous as I wonder why I didn't think of that. I've got a couple of things in my library that I could put to good use in the coming months, A Year with Rumi, A Year with Kafka, Day by Day with Emerson.

Not sure whether I like this better or my baseball cap with the scream logo.

From a remarkable collection of letters about spring at Letters of Note.

The spring is coming. Yesterday the lambs were dancing, and the birds whistled, the doves cooed all day down at the farm. The world of nature is wonderful in its revivifying spontaneity. But oh God, the world of man—who can bear any more? I can’t bear any more of mankind. One can only lapse. At any rate, the cooing of the doves is very real, and the blithe impertinence of the lambs as they peep round their mothers. They affect me like the Rainbow, as a sign that life will never be destroyed, or turn bad altogether.

I keep hoping now for an intimation of spring in the heart of mankind, new world to come. Do you catch any signs? As soon as I do, I shall come forth. One waits in a strange expectancy. I suppose we have our hour for coming out, like everything else.

—The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol.1, edited by James T. Boulton

According to The Writer's Almanac, John Updike gave this account of his creativity—

No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By the age of 40, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings.

Seems like a pretty good description of aging, too.