After Vincenz Serrano sent me the syllable of his class on walking at Ateneo, I asked him, if I’m going to read just one book on the list of references on walking, which is it? He replied, Rebecca Solnit’s A History of Walking.
The ebook has been sitting in my computer for god knows how long so I’m glad I now have a very good reason to start reading it.
In the book, at least where I am right now, Rebecca criticizes Thoreau (who introduced me to walking) along with the entire canon of walking literature. Rebecca argues that the Western walking literature is basically a sausage party that fetishizes rural walking with nature as object. And then she introduces alternative forms of walking, which are less motivated by a desire to romanticize nature and which women have also participated in. One of these forms is urban walking, a “messier” way to walk but one that was not bound to the moralizing tendencies of nature and rural walks.
Chapter 1
Sources for a history of walking
The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. The bodily history of walking is that of bipedal evolution and human anatomy.
Walking is usually practical
Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites.
Things we consider when writing about walking
the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings.
history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers.
That imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet.
The subject of walking trespasses to other fields
it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.
A history of walking can only be partial
though the history of walking is, as part of all these fields and everyone’s experience, virtually infinite, this history of walking I am writing can only be partial, an idiosyncratic path traced through them by one walker, with much doubling back and looking around.
The history of walking is everyone’s history, and any written version can only hope to indicate some of the more well-trodden paths in the author’s vicinity—which is to say, the paths I trace are not the only paths.
Walk outside to think on a large scale
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.
Walking is being and doing simultaneously
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.
It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
Walking is an intentional rhythmic act
Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.
Walking aligns the mind, body, and world
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.
The mind mimics the feet when walking
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. 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.
Walking is a visual activity
Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking’s peculiar utility for thinkers comes from.
Walking is movement not travel
perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion
Walking and seeing generate thoughts
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.
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.
Walking can articulate political meaning
In our actions at the test site the poetry of nature and criticism of society were united in this camping, walking, and trespassing, as though we had figured out how a berrying party could be a revolutionary cadre. It was a revelation to me, the way this act of walking through a desert and across a cattle guard into the forbidden zone could articulate political meaning.
To write about walking write about places and their histories
I began to discover other western landscapes beyond my coastal region and to explore those landscapes and the histories that had brought me to them—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. I found my voice as a writer in describing all the layers of history that shaped my experiences at the test site. And I began to think and to write about walking in the course of writing about places and their histories.
Walking connects us to everyone and everything
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.
Look for what surprises you during walks
It’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.
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 a protest against the loss of public space
Walking is about being outside, in public space, and public space is also being abandoned and eroded in older cities, eclipsed by technologies and services that don’t require leaving home, and shadowed by fear in many places (and strange places are always more frightening than known ones, so the less one wanders the city the more alarming it seems, while the fewer the wanderers the more lonely and dangerous it really becomes).
in many new places, public space isn’t even in the design: what was once public space is designed to accommodate the privacy of automobiles; malls replace main streets; streets have no sidewalks; buildings are entered through their garages; city halls have no plazas; and everything has walls, bars, gates. Fear has created a whole style of architecture and urban design
to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion in many of the subdivisions and gated “communities.”
In some places it is no longer possible to be out in public, a crisis both for the private epiphanies of the solitary stroller and for public space’s democratic functions.
Walking is a protest against the disappearance of the body and liesure
when public space disappears, so does the body
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.
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.
Chapter 2
Walking as a conscious cultural act
The history of walking as a conscious cultural act started with Rousseau. However, John Thelwall traced Rousseau’s walks back to the ancient Greeks in his book The Peripatetic, popularizing the idea that the ancients walked to think.
The image of the walking philosopher has been widespread throughout central Europe that the image created places that reinforce it. For example:
- Philosophenweg in Heidelberg (Hegel)
- Philosophen-damm in Königsberg (Kant)
- The Philosopher’s Way in Copenhagen (Kierkegaard)
the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning.
That history began with the walks of various characters in the eighteenth century, but the more literary among them strove to consecrate walking by tracing it to Greece
The eccentric English revolutionary and writer John Thelwall wrote a massive, turgid book, The Peripatetic, uniting Rousseauian romanticism with this spurious classical tradition.
after Thelwall’s book appeared in 1793, many more would make the claim until it became an established idea that the ancients walked to think, so much so that the very picture seems part of cultural history
Long afterward, the association between walking and philosophizing became so widespread that central Europe has places named after it: the celebrated Philosophenweg in Heidelberg where Hegel is said to have walked, the Philosophen-damm in Königsberg that Kant passed on his daily stroll (now replaced by a railway station), and the Philosopher’s Way Kierkegaard mentions in Copenhagen.
Walking among Greek philosophers
The first Greek schools where made of colonnades called peripatos. Teachers gave their lectures in these colonnades while walking, which gave the schools their name. The same is the case among Stoics, who taught at colonnades called stoa in Athens. The Sophists were also walking philosophers, thinkers who traveled from place to place.
This belief arose from a coincidence of architecture and language.
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.
This colonnade or walk (peripatos) gave the school its name; it seems that it was here, at least at the beginning, that the pupils assembled and the teachers gave their lectures. Here they wandered to and fro; for this reason it was later said that Aristotle himself lectured and taught while walking up and down.
the link between thinking and walking recurs in ancient Greece, and Greek architecture accommodated walking as a social and conversational activity.
Stoics were named after the stoa, or colonnade, in Athens, a most unstoically painted walkway where they walked and talked.
Thinkers are mobile
Whether or not the Sophists were virtuous, they were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale, for the loyalty that ties down the latter will often drive the former from place to place. It is an attachment that requires detachment. 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.
Rousseau was the first to philosophize about walking
Rousseau was the first to theorize about walking as a cultural act. His idea of walking is something done alone in a rural setting. Its objective is to withdraw from society and commune with nature. A withdrawal from society also involves a withdrawal from the tools that make life convenient. Through this simplicity, a walker could contemplate. Solnit argued that Rousseau developed this idea of walking to survive the world he feels betrayed him.
This idea of walk is ideal. It is a walk of a man, free, healthy, and safe. This was the kind of walking undertaken by many after Rousseau.
While this kind of walking is criticized these days, we need to understand it in the context of Rousseau’s revolutionary ideas. Rousseau’s intellectual force favored revolution to emancipate the individual and form that individual to be situated in surroundings that allow them to be free, healthy, and safe.
Philosophers walked. But philosophers who thought about walking are rarer.
It is Rousseau who laid the groundwork for the ideological edifice within which walking itself would be enshrined
In this ideology, walking functions as an emblem of the simple man and as, when the walk is solitary and rural, a means of being in nature and outside society. The walker has the detachment of the traveler but travels unadorned and unaugmented, dependent on his or her own bodily strength rather than on conveniences that can be made and bought—horses, boats, carriages. Walking is, after all, an activity essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.
It was, of course, an ideal walking that he described—chosen freely by a healthy person amid pleasant and safe circumstances—and it is this kind of walking that would be taken up by his countless heirs as an expression of well-being, harmony with nature, freedom, and virtue.
Rousseau portrays walking as both an exercise of simplicity and a means of contemplation.
Walking seems to have become Rousseau’s chosen mode of being because within a walk he is able to live in thought and reverie, to be self-sufficient, and thus to survive the world he feels has betrayed him. It provides him with a literal position from which to speak.
If the literature of philosophical walking begins with Rousseau, it is because he is one of the first who thought it worthwhile to record in detail the circumstances of his musing. If he was a radical, his most profoundly radical act was to revalue the personal and the private, for which walking, solitude, and wilderness provided favorable conditions.
If he inspired revolutions, revolutions in imagination and culture as well as in political organization, they were for him only necessary to overthrow the impediments to such experience. The full force of his intellect and his most compelling arguments had been made in the cause of recovering and perpetuating such states of mind and life as he describes in Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
Thoughts
Laying down the groundwork for walking in the Philippines, where the rural and the urban is constantly at play might require a return to this original “romantic” notion of walking. How can I return to it without being engulfed by romanticism? All I know is that walking the rural is an important consideration in the Philippines.
Perhaps the best settings for walks in the Philippines is places where people still interact with each other as they interact with nature.
How to walk culturally in a place where almost everyone walked either to move with the capitalist society or to go against it? This seems related to the question, should we still make art during war?
To walk in nature outside the romantic tradition, highlight environmental problems.
How can I still walk in nature to find my peace without closing my eyes to the trouble that is all around me? How can I walk to care for myself without forgetting the other human and the nonhuman?
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
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. Each of its chapters is called a walk
Solitary walking
Solitude is an ambiguous state throughout Rousseau’s writings. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, he portrays human beings in their natural state as isolated dwellers in a hospitable forest. But in his more personal work, he often portrays solitude not as an ideal state but as a consolation and refuge for a man who has been betrayed and disappointed.
A solitary walker is in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group.
Digression and association is encouraged in walking literature
The recounted walk, which encourages digression and association over the linearity of discourse or narrative is akin to streams of consciousness. In walk-inspired writing, a jumble of thoughts and recollections is the norm. The walker walks to improvise; not to analyze.
As a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative.
A century and a half later, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop the style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. Rousseau’s Reveries are one of the first portraits of this relationship between thinking and walking.
A walking poetics records in detail the circumstances of creation
The stark difference between writing born outside through walking versus writing born inside, say while sitting, is the writer’s dedication to “detailing” their surroundings, the physical context of their thinking. Thoughts and the outside world go hand in hand and there is a commitment to demonstrate this.
Walking is like the platonic realm through which mind and matter interact.
Grounding one’s thoughts in one’s body and the world generates its own way of writing.
If he inspired revolutions, revolutions in imagination and culture as well as in political organization, they were for him only necessary to overthrow the impediments to such experience. The full force of his intellect and his most compelling arguments had been made in the cause of recovering and perpetuating such states of mind and life as he describes in Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
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. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travelers’ accounts, and first-person essays.
Søren Kierkegaard’s theory on walking
For Kierkegaard, urban walking was like rural botanizing where human beings were his specimens. He saw walking as way to live in a disembodied magical realm where he was the only inhabitant. Kierkegaard practiced walking as a way to connect with the world in his own terms. Walking puts the walker in the middle of the crowd, but the action only affords brief encounters with other people.
Kierkegaard’s philosophy of walking makes him a grandfather of the flaneur.
Søren Kierkegaard is the other philosopher who has much to say about walking and thinking. He chose cities—or one city, Copenhagen—as his place to walk and study his human subjects, though he compared his urban tours to rural botanizing: human beings were the specimens he gathered.
He described himself as already an old man in childhood, as a ghost, as a wanderer, and this pacing back and forth seems to have been instruction in living in a disembodied magical realm of the imagination that had only one real inhabitant, himself.
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. Walking provided Kierkegaard, like Rousseau, with a wealth of casual contacts with his fellow humans, and it facilitated contemplation.
Walking is like writing
Walking is like writing; it is an endeavor to connect with others but not too close and in one’s own terms.
In a way, his appearances on the street were like his appearances on the printed page: endeavors to be in touch, but not too closely and on his own terms. Like Rousseau, he had an exacting relationship with the public.
Working with walking necessitates embracing literary hybridity
Like Rousseau, Kierkegaard is a hybrid, a philosophical writer rather than a philosopher proper. Their work is often descriptive, evocative, personal, and poetically ambiguous, in sharp contrast to the closely reasoned argument central to the Western philosophical tradition. It has room for delight and personality and something as specific as the sound of an organ grinder in a street or rabbits on an island. Rousseau branched out into the novel, the autobiography, and the reverie, and play with forms was central to Kierkegaard’s work: creating a massive postscript to a relatively short essay, layering pseudonymous authors like Chinese boxes within his texts. As a writer his heirs seem to be literary experimentalists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, who play with the way form, voice, reference, and other devices shape meaning.
Walking works well with lyrical philosophy
Rousseau and Kierkegaard’s walking is only accessible to us because they wrote about it in more personal, descriptive, and specific works—Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries, Kierkegaard’s journals—rather than staying in the impersonal and universal realm of philosophy at its most pure.
The romantics walked to modulate their alienation
these eccentrics focus on walking as a means of modulating their alienation, and this kind of alienation was a new phenomenon in intellectual history. They were neither immersed in the society around them nor—save in Kierkegaard’s later years, after the Corsair affair—withdrawn from it in the tradition of the religious contemplative. They were in the world but not of it. A 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.
Husserl’s theory of walking
The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world, in his 1931 essay, “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism.” 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.” That is to say, it is the body that moves but the world that changes, which is how one distinguishes the one from the other: travel can be a way to experience this continuity of self amid the flux of the world and thus to begin to understand each and their relationship to each other. Husserl’s proposal differs from earlier speculations on how a person experiences the world in its emphasis on the act of walking rather than on the senses and the mind.
Solnit’s critique of feminist and postmodern theories’ passive body
One would expect that postmodern theory would have much to say about walking, given that mobility and corporeality have been among its major themes—and when corporeality gets mobile, it walks. Much contemporary theory was born out of feminism’s protest at the way earlier theory universalized the very specific experience of being male, and sometimes of being white and privileged. 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”). But while dismantling this false universal by emphasizing the role of the ethnic and gendered body in consciousness, these thinkers have apparently generalized what it means to be corporeal and human from their own specific experience—or inexperience—as bodies that, apparently, lead a largely passive existence in highly insulated circumstances.
The body described again and again in postmodern theory does not suffer under the elements, encounter other species, experience primal fear or much in the way of exhilaration, or strain its muscles to the utmost. In sum, it doesn’t engage in physical endeavor or spend time out of doors. The very term “the body” so often used by postmodernists seems to speak of a passive object, and that body appears most often laid out upon the examining table or in bed. A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is a site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production. Having been liberated from manual labor and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound (and relevant to walking’s history, as we shall see), only to propose that they are so emphasized because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.
The body presented to us in these hundreds of volumes and essays, this passive body for which sexuality and biological function are the only signs of life, is in fact not the universal human body but the white-collar urban body, or rather a theoretical body that can’t even be theirs, since even minor physical exertions never appear
“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,” writes Susan Bordo, one feminist theorist at odds with this version of embodiment.
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.
Walking is a mode of making and being in the world
Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable, but walking itself extends into the world as do those tools that augment the body. 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. 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 sticks, shoes, maps, canteens, and backpacks are further material results of that 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.
Walking uses the body in the world
Elaine Scarry’s magisterial book The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World
creative efforts—making both stories and objects—construct that world.
tools and manufactured objects as extensions of the body into the world and thus ways of knowing it.
the tools become more and more detached from the body itself, until the digging stick that extends the arm becomes a backhoe that replaces the body.
Highlights I can use in the Buhian essay
Walking as pilgrimage (78)
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.
Why narrative and walking come together (81–82)
Like the stations of the cross, the labyrinth and maze offer up stories we can walk into to inhabit bodily, stories we trace with our feet as well as our eyes. There is a resemblance not only between these symbolically invested structures but between every path and every story. Part of what makes roads, trails, and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sendentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story.
Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there.
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.
Songlines as tools of navigation (82)
The songlines of Australia’s aboriginal peoples are the most famous examples conflating landscape and narrative. The songlines are tools of navigation across the deep desert, while the landscape is a mnemonic device for remembering the stories: in other words, the story is a map, the landscape a narrative.
==Ang mga tula ay mapa, ang
Why we need to connect the products of the mind with space (82)
The workings of the mind and the spirit are hard to imagine, as is the nature of time—so we tend to metaphorize all these intangibles as physical objects located in space. Thus our relationship to them becomes physical and spatial: we move toward or away from them.
Place, walking, and memory (86)
There is a very practical sense in which to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there before. At its most casual, this retracing allows unsought memories of events to return as one encounters the sites of those events. At its most formal it is a means of memorizing.
Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions; to imagine it as a physical place is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached. That is to say, if memory is imagined as a real space—a place, theater, library—then the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking.
To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking is reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text.
Books that resemble walks
But if the book has eclipsed the memory palace as a repository of information, it has retained some of its pattern. In other words, if there are walks that resemble books, there are also books that resemble walks and use the “reading” activity of walking to describe a world. The greatest example is Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the three realms of the soul after death are explored by Dante, guided by Virgil.
Related
References
Solnit, R. (2001). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin Books.