View from Walker front yard, summer 2008

I love being outside. Which makes me wonder why I spend three-quarters of my waking hours inside, at a desk, staring at a monitor, or tapping at a keyboard similar to the one within arm's reach of you.

To earn a living, you moron -- you're thinking. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it does seem odd that so much of our earning a living involves staring at a screen. Odd for me, at least.

I was led to 'look within' (and wonder what I was doing there) through reading an essay by Walter Bagehot. I remember Walter from first year politics at university, though I haven't the foggiest idea what he said. Walter was the editor of The Economist magazine for seventeen years -- this fact courtesy of Wikipedia -- and the book I'm reading is a collection of his essays.

In one essay, he quotes John Milton (1608-1674) on the need to get outside. Now I know nothing about Milton's exercise regime, but, rightly or wrongly, I think of him as being pale, housebound and studious. Anyhow, here's Milton on venturing out:

...in those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature, not to go out and see her riches and partake in her rejoicing in heaven and earth.

If like me, you're wondering, vernal means spring.

Well, how shall we venture forth, Mr Milton? And where shall we go?

...with prudent and staid guides to all quarters of the land; learning and observing all places of strength, all commoditites of buildings and soil, for towns and tillage, harbours and ports of trade. Sometimes taking sea as far as our navy [!], to learn there also what they can in the practical knowledge of sailing and sea-fight (Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies, vol. 1, pp. 119-20).

That's what us deskbound nancy-boys of the twenty-first century need -- more knowledge of sea-fight! After reading Bagehot and Milton, I need to get out.