A Philosophy of Walking

Cover image courtesy Verso, A Philosophy of Walking, copyright 2014

Frédéric Gros has written a whole book about walking--from randonnées (hikes) to promenades (strolls). It's a pleasant tour of the literature, philosophy and history of pedestrianism. Gros is himself a walker and a professor of  philosophy at the University of Paris XII. A Philosophy of Walking is his first book to be translated into English (Verso).

He explores how walking has influenced various writers, philosophers and activists, who saw it as central to their practice--Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Kerouac, Rimbaud, Thoreau, Kant, Gandhi, Rousseau, Baudelaire--as well as anonymous pilgrims and saunterers. Walking was really their element, the precondition of their work and Gros ponders where they walked, how many hours per day, their style of walking. The book is composed of short chapters on the specific writers alternating with sequences on values associated with walking (silence, energy, regeneration, well-being) and different types of walks (daily outings, rambles, strolls, public gardens).

These writers-walkers composed to the rhythm of forest roads or lakeside paths. It was during long walks at dawn, midday and dusk that the ideas would arise, on the road that sentences would form. Nietzsche took up walking in the Alpine woods to cure his migraine headaches and eyestrain. He wrote in route, in pencil in small notebooks. "He walked all day long," Gros writes, "scribbling down here and there what the walking body--confronting sky, sea, glaciers--breathed into his thought." Wordsworth was the originator of the long expedition, rambling in the English Lake District, using all his excursions as material for his poems. He was the first to conceive of the walk as "a poetic act, a communion with nature, contemplation of the landscape." Thoreau wrote about his experience of walking daily around Concord, representations that he had taken in and conserved, "writing in the aftermath of those solidly marked paces." He made it a principle to give no more time to writing than he had to walking--three to four hours every day.

Reflecting on Walter Benjamin's essays on the poet Baudelaire and his walks through Paris, Gros also examines sojourns through the urban landscape and the notion of the flâneur. The flâneur experiences walking in a way far removed from Nietzsche or Thoreau. Towns and cities impose "an interrupted, uneven rhythm, the stroller captures implausible encounters, fleeting coincidences, vignettes."

An excerpt from the chapter on strolls:

Of course the art of strolling is a recreational technique. But that sort of recreation can also be a literal re-creation, particularly in town. Usually people walk the streets in a thoroughly practical manner, to go for bread, to the shops, to the bus or subway, to drop in on a friend. Then, streets are just corridors. People walk with their heads down, recognizing only what they need to. They look at nothing, they navigate, perceiving only the functional minimum: turn right at the green pharmacy sign, that big brown gateway means the bakery is on the next corner. Thus the street becomes a mere tissue of feeble, twinkling signs, with its spectacle largely extinguished. 

One needs to give oneself the treat--unusual but easy--of walking in one's own neighborhood, walking there with a hesitant, irregular pace, deciding to take a stroll there for no reason, slowly, with eyes raised for once. Just walking, without rush, without any set purpose, makes the town look a little as it might have looked to one seeing it for the first time. With no focus on anything in particular, everything is offered in abundance: colors, details, shapes, aspects. Strolling, walking alone and without purpose, restores that vision: the color of those shutters, the slash of color they make on the walls; the black arabesques of window grilles; the comically differing houses, tall and narrow like stone giraffes or low and broad like stout turtles; the construction of windows, bright orange reflecting the sunset against mottled grey façades. One can plunder the streets delicately like that for ages.