If one cannot be off on a long-distance walk, the next best thing is to dream about such adventures, and one of the best ways to fuel such dreams is to return to Rebecca Solnit's insightful book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Set forth below are some of Ms. Solnit's observations on the fine art and unexpected pleasures of walking. May you be inspired, as I am, to grab your rucksack and hit the road as soon as possible.
The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.
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To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking . . . Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.
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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 itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. Is is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
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Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and 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 rhythm of walking generates a kind 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.
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The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or 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, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by 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.
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Of course walking, as any reader of Thoreau's essay "Walking" knows, inevitably leads into other subjects. Walking is a subject that is always straying.
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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 the erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
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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.
A planned walk of the Wales coastline (Pembrokeshire Coastal Path) had to be cancelled earlier this summer because of conflicts on the home front. If all goes well, however, I will be off to another destination within the next week. More to come on this when I return . . .
ONWARD!
