The Art of Wandering

The Writer as Walker

Merlin Coverley

• Publisher: Oldcastle Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781842433706
• eBook ISBN: 9781842436400
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

A philosophical history of that strange but prolific hybrid—the writer as walker

From the peripatetic philosophers of Ancient Greece to the streets of 20th-century London, Paris, and New York, the figure of writer as walker has continued to evolve through the centuries, the philosopher and the Romantic giving way to the experimentalist and radical. From pilgrim to pedestrian, flâneur to stalker, the names may change, but the activity of walking remains constant, creating a literary tradition encompassing philosophy and poetry, the novel and the manifesto; a tradition which this book explores in detail. Today, as the figure of the wanderer returns to the forefront of the public imagination, writers and walkers around the world are reengaging with the ideas which animated earlier generations—for the walker is once again on the march, mapping new territory and recording new visions of the landscape.

The Walker as Philosopher

To travel on foot, is to travel like Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1

Philosophers walked. But philosophers who thought about walking are rarer. Rebecca Solnit.2

In one of the less celebrated accounts of literary walking, Of Walks and Walking Tours: An Attempt to find a Philosophy and a Creed (1914), the author, Arnold Haultain, draws up a shortlist of ‘notable walkers’ in which the usual suspects, De Quincey and Stevenson, are joined by their classical forebears, Plato, Virgil and Horace. At the top of the list are Jesus and Mohammed.3 This attempt to trace the genesis of the literary walk to its biblical roots is by no means uncommon, often taking as its starting point the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, a symbolic moment memorialised in the closing lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): ‘The world was all before them, where to choose/ Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.’4 It is not Adam and Eve, however, but their offspring, Cain and Abel, who have been identified as establishing the primordial division between the walker or nomad and his more sedentary cousin, the settler. In his book, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (2002), Francesco Careri describes a division between what he calls ‘nomadic’ and ‘erratic’ space, the consequence of two different ways of living and working in the world, to which he ascribes a biblical source:

The sons of Adam and Eve embody the two souls in which the human race is divided from the outset: Cain is the sedentary soul, Abel the nomadic one […] Cain can be identified with Homo Faber, the man who works and tames nature to materially construct a new universe, while Abel, whose job was, all told, less tiring and more amusing, can be seen as Homo Ludens […] the man who plays and constructs an ephemeral system of relations between nature and life.5

‘So from the very beginning,’ concludes Careri, ‘artistic creation, as well as that rejection of work […] was associated with walking.’6 While Abel, the prototype nomad, wanders in the hills, free to play while his sheep graze, Cain stays and tills the land, no doubt feeling increasingly embittered. It is clear how this story is going to end. And yet, in the aftermath of Abel’s murder at the hands of his brother, divine punishment lends this tale an ironic twist:

It is interesting to note that after the murder Cain is punished by God by being condemned to roam the face of the earth: Abel’s nomadism is transformed from a condition of privilege to one of divine punishment. The error of fratricide is punished with a sentence to err without a home, eternally lost in the land of Nod, the infinite desert where Abel had previously roamed. And it should be emphasized that after the death of Abel the first cities are constructed by the descendents of Cain: Cain, the farmer condemned to wander, gives rise to the sedentary life and therefore to another sin, he carries with him the origins of the stationary life of the farmer and those of the nomadic life of Abel, both experienced as a punishment and an error […] The nomads came from the lineage of Cain, who was a settler forced to become a nomad, and they carry the wanderings of Abel in their roots.7

For those seeking the historical antecedents with which to establish a philosophy of walking, however, and in particular for those Enlightenment thinkers who were to regard the philosopher-walker as emblematic of their newfound intellectual freedom, such biblical foundations were insufficient or irrelevant. What was really required was the support of the classical tradition.

As Rousseau’s remark above indicates, to travel on foot is, indeed, to travel in the manner of Thales, Plato and Pythagoras. Yet for those searching for evidence of walking as an intentional act, rather than simply as a means of locomotion, the classical age appears to have very little to offer. Plato’s Phaedrus, for example, has been repeatedly identified as the text in which Socrates emerges as an early, if not the earliest, philosopher-walker. On closer inspection, however, this becomes a highly questionable assertion, for the Phaedrus remains the only one of Plato’s dialogues in which we see Socrates depart from his familiar urban haunts, and rather belying his status as the archetypal walker, he is admonished for his reluctance to stray beyond Athens’ city walls:

Phaedrus: […] it’s proof of how you never leave town either to travel abroad, or even, I think, to step outside the city walls at all.

Socrates: You’ll have to forgive me, my friend. I’m an intellectual, you see, and country places with their trees tend to have nothing to teach me, whereas people in town do. But I think you’ve found a way to charm me outside […]8

Socrates, the city-dwelling intellectual, is only lured out of the city by the prospect of reading a speech which Phaedrus has prepared, and this walk is by no means an epic, as Socrates wastes no time in finding the nearest tree under which he can consult Phaedrus’ work. Walking here provides a background to the ideas discussed and is never more than ancillary to them.

In fact, the stroll was a well-established classical device for providing the setting for philosophising, if not itself regarded as a subject fit for philosophical discussion. Hence, Virgil’s Georgics, the pastoral idylls of Theocritus and Horace, and even Homer’s Odyssey, have all been identified as further examples of the integral role the act of walking plays in the classical canon. But in all these cases, if the walk is to have a role, it is not a philosophical but a literary one, providing a handy structural device in which the physical rhythm of the walk lends a degree of dynamism to the text. Walking and talking regularly coincide here, but the conjunction of these two everyday activities is never formalised in any way, let alone as the basis to any philosophical position. In short, as Morris Marples has reminded us, ‘we find the Greeks taking pleasure in the combined operation of walking and talking […] But no Greek or Roman ever went for a walking-tour.’9

Amidst the scant evidence that the classical world elevated the act of walking to anything more than a means to an end, there remains one Greek school of thought which, although contested by modern scholars, is consistently identified as the point at which Western philosophy and walking first intersect. ‘Western philosophy finds its beginnings in walking, with the Peripatetic philosophers’ writes David Macauley, ‘who walked boldly out of the dark and deep realm of myth and into the lighted house of logos.’10 The persistent claim that the bodily rhythms of walking somehow correspond to mental processes appears to originate here, in the Athenian school of philosophy founded by Aristotle. While emphasising the link between walking and thinking, however, the belief that the Peripatetic school provides a philosophical grounding for this position, a belief which later writers have been so keen to promote, itself appears to be little more than a myth arising from a linguistic misunderstanding.

The term Peripatetic is used to describe the followers of Aristotle’s school of philosophy, founded in Athens in around 335 BC, and continued by his successors, amongst them Theophrastus and Strato. A transliteration of the ancient Greek word

meaning ‘of walking’ or ‘given to walking about’, the term has evolved to apply to any act of itinerant wandering or meandering. The school itself, however, or peripatos, the Lyceum gymnasium in which the members met, derives its name from the peripatoi

the colonnades or covered walkways through which Aristotle is alleged to have walked while lecturing. It is out of this confusion that the belief arose that walking was somehow an intrinsic part of the philosophical method employed by Aristotle and his followers. In reality, however, and rather more prosaically, it appears that the Peripatetics owe their name not to their philosophy, but to the setting in which it was conducted; and not only has this myth arisen from linguistic confusion, but the Peripatetics have since been subjected to further misrepresentation, as later writers wilfully overlooked reality in favour of the more romantic image of the strolling philosopher. According to Rebecca Solnit, the chief culprit here was John Thelwall, whose work, The Peripatetic, was first published in 1793. Thelwall’s peculiar but highly influential blend of biography and philosophical treatise is almost completely neglected today but his misguided attempt to ‘consecrate the act of walking’ has survived him, and the spurious classical tradition he endorsed lives on.11

Beyond the fact that, architecturally at least, walking was accommodated within the Lyceum as the basis for conversational, if not philosophical, activity, it is by now impossible to determine with any certainty what role, if any, the act of walking held in classical philosophy. If, at the very least, the Peripatetics can be said to exemplify a tradition of meditative walking, in which philosophical thought is in some way harnessed to the physical movements of the walker, then this activity, as Socrates indicates in the Phaedrus, is one more usually reserved for the enclosed spaces of the peripatos. Such a tradition, in which walking comes to be seen as primarily a contemplative, even educative, act, is one which was continued, albeit in a more spiritual fashion, within the monastic confines of the Middle Ages. In this respect, it has little in common with the unbounded, and less structured excursions favoured by the Romantics, to whom the walk and the walker were to become symbolic not of systematic thought, but of intellectual freedom and solitary creativity. And, as we shall see in the following chapter, while this former position helps to establish the figure of the walker as pilgrim, a tradition with a significant literary history of its own, it is out of this latter current, that the episodic and often fragmentary history of philosophical walking was to emerge.

In reality, this philosophical tradition can largely be reduced to little more than a walking-themed s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Book
• About the Author
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Writer as Walker
• Chapter One: The Walker as Philosopher
• Chapter Two: The Walker as Pilgrim
• Chapter Three: The Imaginary Walker
• Chapter Four: The Walker as Vagrant
• Chapter Five: The Walker and the Natural World
• Chapter Six: The Walker as Visionary
• Chapter Seven: The Flâneur
• Chapter Eight: Experimental Walking
• Chapter Nine: The Return of the Walker
• Bibliography
• Online Sources
• Acknowledgement
• By the Same Author
• Copyright