Indeed, the metaphysical wanderings that the physical act precipitates are what makes walking transcend its utilitarian purpose of bipedal mobility. Art by Shaun Tan for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
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. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking.
The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. Walking is embodied presence in motion, presence at once with ourselves and with the world, inner and outer - an active presence of body and mind, which Solnit captures in the opening pages: Half a century later, Swiss modernist writer Robert Walser captured this spirit in his short story “The Walk,” which includes this exquisite line: “With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.”īut no one has written about walking, its cultural history, and its spiritual rewards more beautifully and with more dimension than Rebecca Solnit in her 2000 masterpiece Wanderlust: A History of Walking ( public library).
“Of all ridiculous things,” Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating our greatest source of unhappiness, “the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy - to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.” Just a few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, another sage of the ages considered a particularly perilous form of briskness - in 1861, Thoreau penned his timeless treatise on walking and the spirit of sauntering.
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