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The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.—thomas merton
To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.
I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale.
thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.
The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.
a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors.
It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.
the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued—that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced.
The indeterminacy of a ramble, on which much may be discovered, is being replaced by the determinate shortest distance to be traversed with all possible speed, as well as by the electronic transmissions that make real travel less necessary.
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.
Fear has created a whole style of architecture and urban design, notably in southern California, where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion in many of the subdivisions and gated “communities.”
The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don’t know you are looking for, and you don’t know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
In this context, walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.
Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
Too, ideas are not as reliable or popular a crop as, say, corn, and those who cultivate them often must keep moving in pursuit of support as well as truth.
Kierkegaard’s great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters, acquaintances’ greetings, and overheard conversations.
Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.
Perhaps it is because walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing.
solitary walker, however short his or her route, is unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group.
Feminism and postmodernism both emphasize that the specifics of one’s bodily experience and location shape one’s intellectual perspective. The old idea of objectivity as speaking from nowhere—speaking while transcending the particulars of body and place—was laid to rest; everything came from a position, and every position was political (and as George Orwell remarked much earlier, “The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion”).
The path is an extension of walking, the places set aside for walking are monuments to that pursuit, and walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.
Walking, I realized long ago in another desert, is how the body measures itself against the earth.
“African Eve” or “Mitochondrial Eve.”
The bones unearthed in Africa in ever greater quantity remain enigmatic in crucial ways, and the business of their interpretation recalls the ancient Greeks reading the entrails of animals to divine the future, or the Chinese throwing I Ching sticks to understand the world.
Paleontology sometimes seems like a courtroom full of lawyers, each waving around evidence that confirms their hypotheses and ignoring the evidence that contradicts it
Humans are slow animals, they said, and what we excel at is distance, sustaining a pace for hours or days.
Walking is an odd fulcrum in human evolutionary theory. It is the anatomical transformation that propelled us out of the animal kingdom to eventually occupy our own solitary position of dominion over the earth.
the landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically and look at the view you’ll see coming back.
Secular walking is often imagined as play, however competitive and rigorous that play, and uses gear and techniques to make the body more comfortable and more efficient. Pilgrims, on the other hand, often try to make their journey harder, recalling the origin of the word travel in travail, which also means work, suffering, and the pangs of childbirth.
that nonbeliever’s paradise, nature,
There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage, as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey.
Walking expresses both the simplicity and the purposefulness of the pilgrim.
The political content that motivated her and the way in which she endeavored to achieve change through influencing her fellow human beings rather than through divine intervention make her the first of a horde of modern political pilgrims.
fund-raising walks have become the mainstream American version of the pilgrimage.
Cars function best as exclusionary devices, as mobile private space. Even driven as slowly as possible, they still don’t allow for the directness of encounter and fluidity of contact that walking does.
Christianity is a portable religion, and even this route once so specific to Jerusalem was exported around the world.
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do.
Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there—not saints and gods anymore, but shepherds, hunters, engineers, emigrants, peasants to market, or just commuters.
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as guide—a guide one may not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted upon to take one somewhere.
These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized it.—mary shelley, frankenstein
Most who have written about this first generation of Romantics propose that they themselves introduced walking as a cultural act, as a part of aesthetic experience.
country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.”
Though many nowadays go to the fields and woods to walk, the desire to do so is largely the result of three centuries of cultivating certain beliefs, tastes, and values.
We tend to consider the foundations of our culture to be natural, but every foundation had builders and an origin—which is to say that it was a creative construction, not a biological inevitability.
Which is to say, walking is natural, or rather part of natural history, but choosing to walk in the landscape as a contemplative, spiritual, or aesthetic experience has a specific cultural ancestry.
the garden was becoming more cinematic than pictorial; it was designed to be experienced in motion as a series of compositions dissolving into each other rather than as a static picture.
The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England’s privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish.
