I don't reflect very much on why I run. I just do. Reading Paul Valéry recently, I came across his statement on the craft of poetry. It summarizes for me why I run.
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"It happened at certain stages in my life that poetry became a way of cutting myself off from the "world."
By "world" I mean the whole complex of incidents, demands, compulsions, solicitations, of every kind and degree of urgency, which overtake the mind without offering it any inner illumination, move it only to disturb, and shift it away from the more important toward the less...
It is no bad thing if certain men have the strength of mind to attach more value and significance to determining a remote decimal number, or the exact placing of a comma, than to the most resounding of news items, the most terrible catastrophe, or even to their own lives.
This leads me to reflect that one of the advantages of observing traditional forms in the construction of verse consists in the extreme attention which is developed by this discipline, conceived as an ordering toward continuous musicality and the charm of sustained perfection which (according to some minds) is what a true poem ought to offer. The result is an absence of prose --- a freedom, that is, from any sense of interruption. To outlaw the arbitrary: to shut out accidents, politics, the chaos of events, and the fluctuation of fashion; to attempt to draw from oneself some work more exquisite than one might have hope; to find strength in oneself not to be satisfied with less than prolonged struggles (emphasis mine), to set about a passionate quest for the solving of problems imperceptible to most people, in defiance of the headlong rush, the distractions (however affecting) that intrude from the outside world -- this is something that appeals to me."
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Running after all is a form of inner poetic expression, the writing of verse with one's own body.
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