A Philosophy of Walking (10 page)

A day will surely come when we will just stop worrying, stop being taken over and imprisoned by our chores (while knowing very well that we have invented most of them, imposed them on ourselves). Working: accumulating savings, perpetual anxiety not to miss any career opportunity, coveting this or that job, rushing the work, worrying about competitors. Do this, take a look at that, invite so-and-so: social constraints, cultural fashions, busy busy busy … but always to do something, not to ‘be'. We leave that for later: there's always something better, more urgent, more important to be done now. Being can wait until tomorrow. But tomorrow brings chores for the day after … An endless tunnel. And they call it living. So pervasive is the pressure that even leisure carries the stamp of single-mindedness: sport carried to painful extremes, stimulant relaxations, costly dinners, active nights, expensive holidays. Until finally the only way out seems to be through melancholia or death.

You're doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood. So that walking, by unburdening us, prising us from the obsession with doing, puts us in touch with that childhood eternity once again. I mean that walking is so to speak child's play. To marvel at the beauty of the day, the brightness of the sun, the grandeur of the trees, the blue of the sky: to do that takes no experience, no ability. It is
therefore sensible, incidentally, to distrust people who walk too much and too far: they have already seen everything and only make comparisons. The eternal child is one who has never seen anything so beautiful, because he doesn't compare. So when we set off for a few days, a few weeks, we are not just leaving behind our jobs, neighbours, affairs, habits and troubles; but also our complicated identities, our faces and masks. None of that can hold for long, because walking never calls for anything but the body. None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests.

You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze. Emerson wrote:

With its great shocks, Nature thus awakens us from the human nightmare.

Perhaps yet another, the eternity of consonance. You would have to describe exactly what aspect of a landscape comes to you when walking that couldn't come in any other way. As a car passenger, watching the landscapes pass, I contemplate pure mountain skylines, am transported across fascinating deserts, wind through incredible forests. From time to time I ask to stop, stretch my legs, take a few photos. Things are pointed out and details given: what species of tree, prevailing plant life, the back of those outcrops. Of course the sun is also hot, the colours vivid too, and the sky generous.

But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it
becomes
the landscape. That doesn't have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It's more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.

Conquest of the Wilderness – Thoreau
 

D
avid Henry Thoreau was born in the small town of Concord, Mass., near Boston, in July 1817, the third child of a pencil manufacturer. He did well at Harvard, and after graduating started teaching at a high school, but stayed there barely a fortnight. He objected to the use of corporal punishment on his pupils, and wanted his lessons to alternate with long walks. He returned to the family pencil factory. In 1837 he reversed the order of his given names, becoming Henry David Thoreau, and started writing a journal which he kept for the rest of his life.

In 1838 he founded a private school with his brother, but the experiment did not last long. He was soon working as a
factotum in Emerson's household, while publishing poems in
The Dial
, frequenting the town's Transcendentalist Club and helping to edit its review. He left Concord for a time to act as tutor to Emerson's nephews in Staten Island, NY, but stayed there only a year. In March 1845 he started building a cabin near Walden Pond, where Emerson had bought a piece of land. It was to be his philosophic act.

He lived there alone for more than two years, in perfect autarchy, among trees, beside a lake, tilling the soil, walking, reading and writing. In July 1846 he was arrested at the cabin and taken to jail for refusing to pay his poll tax arrears, in protest against the Mexican–American war and the government's failure to abolish slavery. The experience led eventually to a major and influential political work,
Civil Disobedience
. But he only spent one night in jail because a benefactor – his aunt, it is thought – paid the tax against his wishes.

He left Walden in July 1847 and lived in the Emerson household for a year, then returned to his family home, now working as a land surveyor. He made a number of trips – to Quebec, New Hampshire and to the White Mountains, where he made contact with Indian tribes. He continued to campaign for the abolition of slavery.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four, leaving an immense, fascinating oeuvre including the magical
Walden
, the distilled account of his two years living in the forest. He is the author of the first philosophic treatise on walking:
Walking
.

Thoreau lived in the first half of the nineteenth century,
at the beginning of the era of large-scale mass production (soon to evolve into all-devouring big capitalism and industrial exploitation – of workers, but also of resources). He foresaw the single-minded scramble for profits, and the vandalism of a Nature being treated as a free source of lucre. Confronted with the development of this lust for unlimited wealth, faced with the blind capitalization of material goods, Thoreau proposed a
new economics
.

The principle is a simple one. Instead of asking what return a given activity will produce, the question is what it costs in terms of pure life: ‘the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.' This is also a way of distinguishing between profit and benefit. What profit is obtained from a long forest walk? None: nothing saleable is produced, no social service is rendered which needs to be rewarded. In that respect, walking is thoroughly useless and sterile. In traditional economic terms it is time wasted, frittered away, dead time in which no wealth is produced. Nevertheless the benefit to me, to my life – I won't even say interior, I mean to the totality, in absolute terms – is immense: a long moment in which I look into myself, without being invaded by volatile, deafening hassles or alienated by the incessant cackle of chatterers. I capitalize myself with myself all day: a long moment in which I remain listening or in contemplation: and thus, Nature lavishes all its colours on me. On me alone. Walking magnifies receptiveness: I'm always receiving pure presence by the ton. All of that must obviously count for something. In
the end walking has been the more beneficial for being less profitable: what was given to me was given in profusion.

The difference between profit and benefit is that operations producing profit can be carried out by another in my place: he would make the profit, unless he was acting on my behalf. But the fact remains that profitable activity can always be carried out by someone else. Hence the principle of competition. On the other hand, what is beneficial to me depends on gestures, acts, living moments which it would be impossible for me to delegate. Thoreau wrote in a letter that when considering a course of action, one should ask: ‘Could someone else do it in my place?' If the answer is yes, abandon the idea, unless it is absolutely essential. But it is still not bound up in the inevitable part of life. Living, in the deepest sense, is something no one else can do for us. You can be replaced at work, but not for walking. That's the great difference.

The striking thing with Thoreau is not the actual content of the argument. After all, sages in earliest Antiquity had already proclaimed their contempt for possessions and trumpeted the value of spiritual riches, or again had asserted that a man is wealthy who feels that he lacks for nothing. What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau's obsession with calculation runs deep. He does not say: let us reject economic weighing of quantities in favour of a pure idea of quality. He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose? What do I lose in pure living when I strive to earn more money? What it costs rich people to be rich, working, worrying, watching, never letting go.

You need a roof, Thoreau admits, walls, a bed, chairs. But: what roof, what things exactly? If you want a very large house and shiny door handles, you will have to work hard, to forget for many years what the weather is like and the colour of the sky. A lot of profit, then, which will be beneficial to no one. A roof, just to keep out the weather and the cold, three chairs (one to sit on, the second for friendship, and the third for society), one bed and a good blanket for sleeping: to have all this doesn't cost much, requires minimum labour (a little manual work, growing some beans to exchange for rice) and returns a lot: with the rest of the time, you can take very long walks – three or four hours a day – to gratify the body, and enjoy Nature's endless free spectacles (animals, the play of light slanting through the woods, depths of blue on the lake surface).

The reckoning was established, almost inverting the rhythm of the laborious, religious week: to make enough to live simply, one day's work a week is sufficient. All the other days worked are to earn the useless, the futile, the luxurious, and they devour the essential. My house, said Thoreau, who kept precise accounts, will have cost me just over twenty-eight dollars.

Work produces wealth as much as it produces poverty. Poverty in this sense is not the opposite of wealth: it is its exact complement. The rich man greedily consumes, eyeing his neighbour's plate to see if it contains more than his. The poor man for his part seizes the leftovers from the feast. They are playing the same game, it's just that there are winners and losers. The frugality Thoreau recommends
is opposed as much to wealth as it is to poverty: the wealth of those who become alienated in order to have more and more, the poverty of those who toil to earn the square root of nothing. Instead it is against the system, a matter of refusing to play. Not hanging onto your capital, saving parsimoniously, refraining from spending, but staying out of the game altogether: a chosen, conscious frugality.

Frugality is not quite the same as austerity. What I mean is that austerity always includes the idea of resisting the temptation of excess: too much food, too much wealth, too many possessions, too much pleasure. Austerity pinpoints the slope from pleasure towards excess. So it is a question of holding back, cutting down on quantities, saying no. In austerity there is a good proportion of severity, a contempt or rather a fear of pleasure. Austerity is a refusal to let go, an interdiction on feeling too much for fear of being carried away. Frugality, in contrast, is the discovery that simplicity is fulfilling, the discovery of perfect enjoyment with little or nothing: water, a fruit, the breathing of the wind. Ah! To be able to get drunk, Thoreau writes, on the air we breathe!

Telling us what a lot of effort it costs a man to acquire possessions and wealth, Thoreau invites us to look at him striving day after day, and think what he denies himself by working. You should persist in calculating, and you will have to confess, Thoreau says, that you go faster on foot. Because to own a team, a carriage, will cost you days of work. The distance you can cover in a carriage in a day will cost you several months of work … so walk! You will get there sooner,
and you will also have gained the depth of the sky and the colour of the trees.