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We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of place must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.—gary snyder, “blue mountains constantly walking”
Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us back to the sites of this history.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time;
This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.
It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.
the history not only of the development of the West but of the Romantic taste for walking and landscape, the democratic tradition of resistance and revolution, the more ancient history of pilgrimage and walking to achieve spiritual goals.
Walking is a subject that is always straying.
We talked about the more stately sense of time one has afoot and on public transit, where things must be planned and scheduled beforehand, rather than rushed through at the last minute, and about the sense of place that can only be gained on foot.
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. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.
It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
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.”
If there is a history of walking, then it too has come to a place where the road falls off, a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce, where bodies are not in the world but only indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic or feeble. In this context, walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.
When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
The philosophers who came from it were called the Peripatetic philosophers or the Peripatetic school, and in English the word peripatetic means “one who walks habitually and extensively.” Thus their name links thinking with walking.
Elsewhere he claimed, “Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.
my body has to be on the move to set my mind going. The sight of the countryside, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, a sound appetite, and the good health I gain by walking, the easy atmosphere of an inn, the absence of everything that makes me feel my dependence, of everything that recalls me to my situation—all these serve to free my spirit, to lend a greater boldness to my thinking, so that I can combine them, select them, and make them mine as I will, without fear or restraint.”
Finally, at the end of his life, he wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire in the original; 1782), a book that is and is not about walking.
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.
A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting.
In his journals, he insists that he composed all his works afoot. “Most of Either / Or was written only twice (besides, of course, what I thought through while walking, but that is always the case); nowadays I like to write three times,” says one passage, and there are many like it protesting that although his extensive walks were perceived as signs of idleness they were in fact the foundation of his prolific work.
Perhaps it was that the city strolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively, for his private thoughts are often convolutions of self-consciousness and despair.
The body, he said, is our experience of what is always here, and the body in motion experiences the unity of all its parts as the continuous “here” that moves toward and through the various “theres.”
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”).
“If the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all,”
Travel, the other great theme of recent postmodern theory, is about being utterly mobile; the one has failed to modify the other, and we seem to be reading about the postmodern body shuttled around by airplanes and hurtling cars, or even moving around by no apparent means, muscular, mechanical, economic, or ecological. The body is nothing more than a parcel in transit, a chess piece dropped on another square; it does not move but is moved. In a sense, these are problems arising from the level of abstraction of contemporary theory.
In Elaine Scarry’s magisterial book The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World, she considers first how torture destroys the conscious world of its subjects, then theorizes how creative efforts—making both stories and objects—construct that world. She describes tools and manufactured objects as extensions of the body into the world and thus ways of knowing it.
Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire;
Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for. Out train and car windows, in my imagination, and on my walks through more complicated terrain, flat expanses would call to me, promising walking as I imagined it.
Pat, my companion on this walk across the lake bed, prefers rock climbing, in which every move is an isolated act that absorbs the whole of his attention and seldom rises to a rhythm. It’s a difference of style that cuts deep in our lives: he is something of a Buddhist and conceives of spirituality as being conscious in the moment; while I am a sucker for symbolisms, interpretations, histories, and a Western kind of spirituality that is located less in the here than in the there.
Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the Fall.
The pilgrimage is one of the basic modes of walking, walking in search of something intangible, and we were on pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power.
Or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrimage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul.
Pilgrimage unites belief with action, thinking with doing, and it makes sense that this harmony is achieved when the sacred has material presence and location.
Walking expresses both the simplicity and the purposefulness of the pilgrim.
‘In the experience of walking, each step is a thought. You can’t escape yourself.’”
The Turners talk about pilgrimage as a liminal state—a state of being between one’s past and future identities and thus outside the established order, in a state of possibility.
Liminality comes from the Latin limin, a threshold, and a pilgrim has both symbolically and physically stepped over such a line: “Liminars are stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a homogeneous social state through discipline and ordeal.
“Wherever you go, there you are,” he said whenever someone asked him if we were lost yet.
This made it almost as dizzying a vehicle of meaning as Medina’s car, a transformation of immobile place into speeding representations.
The promenade is a special subset of walking with an emphasis on slow stately movement, socializing, and display. It is not a way of getting anywhere, but a way of being somewhere, and its movements are essentially circular, whether on foot or by car.
Even driven as slowly as possible, they still don’t allow for the directness of encounter and fluidity of contact that walking does. Medina’s car, however, was no longer a vehicle but an object. He stood beside it to receive compliments, and we walked around it less as devotees would walk the stations of the cross than as connoisseurs would tour a gallery.
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. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It’s a form of spatial theater, but also spiritual theater, since one is emulating saints and gods in the hope of coming closer to them oneself, not just impersonating them for others.
It’s this that makes pilgrimage, with its emphasis on repetition and imitation, distinct amid all the modes of walking. If in no other way one can resemble a god, one can at least walk like
There are many other devices besides the stations of the cross that let people bodily enter a story.
Inside the labyrinth the two-dimensional surface ceased to be open space one could move across anyhow. Keeping to the winding path became important, and with one’s eyes fixed upon it, the space of the labyrinth became large and compelling.
