Wanderlust: A History of Walking (12 page)

Sometimes walkers overlay their surroundings with their imaginings and tread truly invented terrain. The American minister and walking enthusiast John Finlay wrote a friend, “You may be interested to know that I have a little game that I play alone: namely, that of walking in some part of the world as many miles as I actually walk here day by day, with the result that I have walked nearly 20,000 miles here in the last six years, which means that I have covered the land part of the earth in a circuit of the globe. I finished last night 2,000 miles since the first of January 1934 and in doing so reached Vancouver from the north.” The Nazi architect Albert Speer traversed the world in his imagination while pacing back and forth in his prison yard, like Kierkegaard and his father. The art critic Lucy Lippard found that after her return to Manhattan she could continue to take the daily walks that had been so important a part of her year's residence in rural England “in a kind of out-of-body form—step by step, weather, texture, views, seasons, wildlife encounters.”

There is a very practical sense in which to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there before. At its most casual, this retracing allows unsought memories of events to return as one encounters the sites of those events. At its most formal it is a means of memorizing. This is the technique of the memory palace, another inheritance from classical Greece widely used until the Renaissance. It was a means of committing quantities of information to memory, an important skill before paper and printing made the written word replace the memory for much storage of rote information. Frances Yates, whose magnificent
Art of Memory
recovered the history of this strange technique for our time, describes the workings of the system in detail. “It is not difficult to get hold of the general principles of the mnemonic,” she writes. “The first step
was to imprint on the memory a series of loci or places. The commonest, though not the only, type of mnemonic place system used was the architectural type. The clearest description of the process is that given by Quintilian. In order to form a series of places in memory, he says, a building is to be remembered, as spacious and various a one as possible, the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated. The images by which the speech is to be remembered . . . are then placed in imagination in the places which have been memorized in the building. This done, as soon as the memory of the facts requires to be revived, all these places are visited in turn and the various deposits demanded of their custodians. We have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing from the memorized places the images that he has placed on them. The method ensures that the points are remembered in the right order, since the order is fixed by the sequence of places in the building.”

Memory, like the mind and time, is unimaginable without physical dimensions; to imagine it as a physical place is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached. That is to say, if memory is imagined as a real space—a place, theater, library—then the act of remembering is imagined as a real act, that is, as a physical act: as walking. The scholarly emphasis is always on the device of the imaginary palace, in which the information was placed room by room, object by object, but the means of retrieving the stored information was walking through the rooms like a visitor in a museum, restoring the objects to consciousness. To walk the same route again can mean to think the same thoughts again, as though thoughts and ideas were indeed fixed objects in a landscape one need only know how to travel through. In this way, walking
is
reading, even when both the walking and reading are imaginary, and the landscape of the memory becomes a text as stable as that to be found in the garden, the labyrinth, or the stations.

But if the book has eclipsed the memory palace as a repository of information, it has retained some of its pattern. In other words, if there are walks that resemble books, there are also books that resemble walks and use the “reading” activity of walking to describe a world. The greatest example is Dante's
Divine Comedy,
in which the three realms of the soul after death are explored by Dante, guided by
Virgil. It is an unearthly travelogue of sorts, moving past sights and characters steadily, always keeping the pace of a tour. The book is so specific about its geography that many editions contain maps, and Yates suggests that in fact this masterpiece was a memory palace of sorts. Like a vast number of stories before and after, it is a travel story, one in which the movement of the narrative is echoed by the movement of the characters across an imaginary landscape.

FROM THE GARDEN TO THE
W
ILD

As some fond virgin, whom her mother's care / Drags from the town to wholesome country air . . . / She went from opera, park, assembly, play / To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day . . .—
ALEXANDER POPE
, “
EPISTLE TO MISS BLOUNT
”

To Hyde-park they repaired; sir Philip boasting all the way they walked, of the superior strength of his head. Clarence protested that his own was stronger than any man's in England, and observed, that at this instant he walked better than any person in company, sir Philip Baddely not excepted. Now, sir Philip Baddely was a noted pedestrian, and he immediately challenged our hero to walk with him for any money he pleased.—
MARIA EDGEWORTH
,
BELINDA

In the evening walked alone down to the Lake by the side of Crow- Park after sun-set and saw the solemn colouring of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hilltops, the deep serene of the asters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day-time. Wished for the moon, but she was dark to me and silent, hid in her vacant interlunar cave.—
THOMAS GRAY
, “
JOURNAL IN THE LAKES
”

On the day after Mary Wollstonecraft first made love to William Godwin she retreated in concern and self-doubt: “Consider what has passed as a fever of your imagination . . . and I will become again a Solitary Walker.”—
E
.
P
.
THOMPSON

I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. . . . These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized it.—
MARY SHELLEY
,
FRANKENSTEIN

He who does not know these sensations has never enjoyed a cool rest at the side of a spring after the hard walk of a summer's day. . . . If in such moments I find no sympathy, and Charlotte does not allow me to enjoy the melancholy consolation of bathing her hand in my tears, I tear myself from her and roam through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, or make a path through a trackless wood, where I am wounded and torn by thorns and briars; and there I find some relief. . . . Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. What a world into which that magnificent poet carries me! To wander over the heath, blown about by the winds, which conjure up by the feeble light of the moon the spirit of our ancestors. . . . At noon I went to walk by the river—I had no appetite. Everything around seemed gloomy.—
GOETHE
,
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER

When his [Coleridge's] health was good, which it certainly was for long spells, he did the most amazing walks and mountain climbs all round the Lakes single-handed. He was in effect the first of the modern fell walkers, the first known outsider to set out to climb the mountain tops, just for the pleasure of doing so. His ascent in 1802 of Scafell Pike, the highest Lakeland peak, is the first recorded climb of that magnificent mountain.—
HUNTER DAVIES
,
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
:
A BIOGRAPHY

I said he has just finished an exquisite ode to Pan—and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it—which he did in his usual half chant, (most touchingly) walking up & down the room. . . .—
BENJAMIN HAYDON

Our walk before breakfast, and after the bath, is the best meal of the day. Anna and Elizabeth are beginning to taste and find out how good it is for mind and body. It was meant that the whole season should be put into us, as it is into a flower.—
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they; all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some verse of the Robin Hood ballads.—
THOREAU
, “
A WALK TO WACHUSETT
”

On another occasion, when I was walking alone I arrived at the Lizard alone and asked if they could give me a bed. “Is your name Mr. Trevelyan?” they answered. “No,” I said, “are you expecting him?” “Yes,” they said, “and his wife is here already.” This surprised me, as I knew it was his wedding day. I found her languishing alone, as he had left her at Truro, saying that he could not face the whole day without a little walk. He arrived about ten o'clock at night, completely exhausted, having accomplished the forty miles in record time, but it seemed to me a somewhat curious beginning for a honeymoon.—
BERTRAND RUSSELL

“And that's to be life!” said Helen, with a catch in her throat. “How can you, with all the beautiful things to see and do—with music—with walking at night—” “Walking is well enough when a man's in work,” he answered. “Oh I did talk a lot of nonsense once, but there's nothing like a bailiff in the house to drive it out of you. When I saw him fingering my Ruskins and Stevensons, I seemed to see life straight real, and it isn't a pretty sight.”—
E
.
M
.
FORSTER
,
HOWARDS END

Rhythm is originally the rhythm of the feet. Every human being walks, and since he walks on two legs with which he strikes the ground in turn and since he only moves if he continues to do this, whether intentionally or not, a rhythmic sound ensues. . . . Animals too have their familiar gait; their rhythms are often richer and more audible than those of men; hoofed animals flee in herds, like regiments of drummers. The knowledge of the animals by which he was surrounded, which threatened him and which he hunted, was man's oldest knowledge. He learnt to know animals by the rhythm of their movement. The earliest writing he learnt to read was that of their tracks; it was a kind of rhythmic notation imprinted on the soft ground. . . . the large numbers of the herd which they hunted blended into their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large, and they expressed this in a specific state of communal excitement which I shall call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd. The means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied.—
ELIAS CANETTI
,
CROWDS AND POWER

Mountains, admired, arouse feeling of horror, attraction of, as background, barrenness admired, beauty of, enjoyment of, “know thyself” philosophy, and men, mysticism, romantic feeling towards, scientific attitude, sublimity, sunrise seen from, walking, and women.—
INDEX ENTRY IN MORRIS MARPLES
'
S
SHANK
'
S PONY

Since the days of Leslie Stephen, the intelligent justifications for a life of climbing have been few, far between, and (vide Mallory) cryptic, at best. . . . Love of nature, by the way, seems to have little to do with it. Superclimbers are, on the whole, uncheerful about hiking, impatient with the weather, insensitive to the subtleties of landscape.—
DAVID ROBERTS

. . . the lure of challenge and testing, the delight of achievement, the contact with our ancestral simplicity, the escape from a normal petty existence, the finding of values, of beauty, of vision. These are worth living for—and possibly dying for.—
HAMISH BROWN
,
IN AN ACCOUNT OF HOW HE CLIMBED ALL
279
MUNROES
—
OR PEAKS OVER
3,000
METERS
—
IN SCOTLAND

There's all sorts of walking—from heading out across the desert in a straight line to a sinuous weaving through undergrowth. Descending rocky ridges and talus slopes is a specialty in itself. It is an irregular dancing—always shifting—step of walk on slabs and scree. The breath and eye are always following this uneven rhythm. It is never paced or clocklike, but flexing—little jumps—sidesteps—going for the well-seen place to put a foot on a rock, hit flat, move on—zigzagging along and all deliberate. The alert eye looking ahead, picking the footholds to come, while never missing the step of the moment. The body-mind is so at one with this rough world that it makes these moves effortlessly once it has had a bit of practice. The mountain keeps up with the mountain.—
GARY SNYDER
, “
BLUE MOUNTAINS CONSTANTLY WALKING
”