When I do not walk in the clouds I walk as though I were lost.

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968), an Italian-born writer who lived in Argentina, is best known for his terse, paradoxical aphorisms collected in Spanish as *Voces* (“Voices”). The line “When I do not walk in the clouds I walk as though I were lost” is characteristic of Porchia’s style: a brief, inward utterance that reads like a distilled spiritual or existential observation rather than a remark tied to a public occasion. It is generally encountered in English translation in editions of *Voices*, which circulated widely among poets and philosophers in the mid-20th century, helping establish Porchia’s reputation as a writer of enigmatic, contemplative maxims.

Porchia contrasts two modes of being: “walking in the clouds” suggests imagination, aspiration, reverie, or a sustaining idealism—an elevated inner life that gives direction. Without that altitude, ordinary movement becomes disoriented: he “walk[s] as though…lost,” implying that practical life alone cannot supply meaning or orientation. The aphorism can be read as a defense of dreaming (not as escapism but as a compass), and as an existential admission that the self requires some form of transcendence—art, faith, love, or vision—to feel located in the world. Its poignancy lies in treating the ‘unreal’ as the condition for feeling real.