A Philosophy of Walking

by Frédéric Gros

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 gently down in sediments inside them, like a kind of reverse erosion, and their body retains those sediments. Walking folds the body over the landscape (and vice versa), just as philosophy folds the soul over thought. The walker and philosopher contend with the same enigma: that of presence. They resolve to remain in that space for a long time, to plunge forever further into it, and to inhabit it. The philosopher entertains the same relationship to concepts as the walker does to the landscape. The sole reward that can be expected is familiarity.