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Always on foot, every time. ‘I’m a pedestrian, nothing more.’ Nothing more.
Anger is needed to leave, to walk. That doesn’t come from outside. In the hollow of the belly the pain of being here, the impossibility of remaining where you are, of being buried alive, of simply staying.
First of all, there is the suspensive freedom that comes by walking, even a simple short stroll: throwing off the burden of cares, forgetting business for a time. You choose to leave the office behind, go out, stroll around, think about other things. With a longer excursion of several days, the process of self-liberation is accentuated: you escape the constraints of work, throw off the yoke of routine.
Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others.
With five or more, it’s impossible to share solitude. So it’s best to walk alone,
They tell this story about a wise pilgrim: he was following a long road, under a dark stormy sky, down a valley in whose dip was a small field of ripe wheat. The well-defined field, among rough scrub and under that black sky, was a perfect square of brightness rippling gently in the wind. The pilgrim enjoyed the beautiful sight as he walked slowly along. Soon he met a peasant returning home with downcast eyes after a hard day’s work, accosted him and pressed his arm, murmuring in a heartfelt tone: ‘Thank you.’ The peasant recoiled slightly: ‘I have nothing to give you, poor man.’ The pilgrim
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I never do anything but when walking, the countryside is my study. The mere sight of a table, books and paper bores me, the tools of work discourage me. If I sit down to write, nothing comes to me. If I am forced to use my wits, they desert me. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mon Portrait
sixteen or even twenty you carry no burden but your cheerful hopes. No memories weigh down your shoulders. All is still possible, all is yet to be experienced. Desires are forming within you, delighted with all possibilities. It is the walk of happy daybreaks, the resplendent mornings of life.
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And there, walking all day long, Rousseau conceived the insane plan to identify – in himself, homo viator, walking man – the natural man, one not disfigured by culture, education, art: man as he would have been before books or salons, before society or paid labour. He wasn’t walking to find his own identity, or to rediscover a disguised singularity, or to get a rest from shuffling masks; but walking long distances to find in himself the man from another age, the first man.
Thus, walking reminds us constantly of our finiteness: bodies heavy with needs, nailed to the ground. Walking doesn’t mean getting the better of gravity, or letting speed and height delude you on your mortal condition; it means reconciling yourself to it through that exposure to the mass of the ground. Our leaden bodies fall back to earth at every step and find reassurance there. Walking is an invitation to die standing up.
lacunae
And then along came Albert Dadas, born five years after Nerval’s death. As Dadas could neither read nor write, what we know of him comes from medical records of the time in which we see the first appearance in Europe of conditions no longer recognized today, such as automatic walking, dromomania, poriomania, determinismo ambulatorio (Italy) and Wandertrieb (Germany).
The walker never has the landscape in front of them. They are not the kind of hurried traveller who jumps out of their car, looks, spots something, assesses it, takes a photograph and heads off again with a snapshot to prove that they were there: been there, done that. That is a trace of an event that is already dead, measurable only in pixels. By contrast, walkers envelop the landscape and are enveloped by it. An overlapping of folds. Indeed, they barely even look at it. They breathe it in, and they breathe it out through every pore, with every step. The presence of the hills lays itself
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Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels. – Sitting still (I said it once already) – is the real sin against the Holy Ghost. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
ineluctable.
In walking, you find these moments of pure pleasure, around encounters. The scent of blackberries or myrtle, the gentle warmth of an early summer sun, the freshness of a stream. Something never known before. In this way walking permits, in bright bursts, that clearance of a path to feeling, in discreet quantities: a handful of encounters along the way.
A path, by contrast, is a ‘tribute to space’, which is why ‘every stretch … invites us to stop’. A path does not connect but rather crosses space. It opens up a wood or a valley to the hiker: it is a source of revelation and discovery. In always opting to walk, we are paying tribute to the landscape.
sonorous
Charles Péguy, most notably in his Présentation de la Beauce, made the pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Chartres in 1912 to pray for the recovery from typhoid of his son Pierre, composing interminable verses on the road: We go straight forward, hands down in pockets, Without any kit, without clobber or talk, With a pace always even, no haste or refuge, From these fields right here to the next nearest there, You see us marching, the poor bloody infantry, We never take more than one step at a time.
flânerie
The end of the world is not when everything stops. It’s when everything continues, unendingly.
Rabindranath Tagore’s terrible lines: If they answer not to thy call walk alone, if they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall, O thou unlucky one, open thy mind and speak out alone. If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness, O thou unlucky one, trample the thorns under thy tread, and along the blood-lined track travel alone.
Walking makes time reversible.
The only Greek sages who were authentic walkers were the Cynics,* forever on the move, shuffling like vagabonds about the streets. Like dogs. Always rambling from city to city, from public square to public square.
The walker is king, and the earth is his domain. The necessary, once conquered, is never lacking, for it is everywhere and belongs to all, the property of none. Whence comes this final reversal, from poverty to wealth.
Walking is restful because, by changing our rhythm, it unshackles the limbs as it does the mind’s faculties. Walking in the first place means defying the constraints: choosing your route, your pace and your representations. Schelle comes up with a complete Kantian aesthetic, applied to walking.
flâneur,
Strolling requires those urban concentrations that developed in the nineteenth century, so dense and unbroken that you can walk for hours without seeing a piece of country.
The abstract intelligence produces a weariness that’s the worst of all fatigues. It doesn’t weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It’s the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.
When I’m exhausted, and have had my fill of sun and wind, I will stop. But in the meantime, I don’t even think about it – I simply walk, and life goes on.
