Finally, at the end of his life, he wrote Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire in the original; 1782), a book that is and is not about walking. Each of its chapters is called a walk, and in the Second Walk, he states his premise: “Having therefore decided to describe my habitual state of mind in this, the strangest situation which any mortal will ever know, I could think of no simpler or surer way of carrying out my plan than to keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them.” Each of these short personal essays resembles the sequence of thoughts or preoccupations one might entertain on a walk, though there is no evidence they are the fruit of specific walks. Several are meditations on a phrase, some are recollections, some are little more than aired grievances. Together the ten essays (the eighth and ninth were still drafts and the tenth was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1778) portray a man who has taken refuge in the thoughts and botanical pursuits of his walks, and who through them seeks and recalls a safer haven.
A solitary walker is in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group. Walking seems to have become Rousseau’s chosen mode of being because within a walk he is able to live in thought and reverie, to be self-sufficient, and thus to survive the world he feels has betrayed him. It provides him with a literal position from which to speak. As a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative. A century and a half later, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop the style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. Rousseau’s Reveries are one of the first portraits of this relationship between thinking and walking.
Rousseau walks alone, and the plants he gathers and strangers he encounters are the only beings toward whom he expresses tenderness. In the Ninth Walk, he reminisces about earlier walks, which seem to slide out from each other like sections of a telescope to focus on his distant past. He begins with a walk two days before to the Ecole Militaire, then moves to one outside Paris two years before, and then to a garden excursion with his wife four or five years before, and finally recounts an incident that pre-dated even this last recollection by many years, in which he bought all the apples a poor girl was selling and distributed them among hungry urchins loitering nearby. All these recollections were prompted by reading an obituary of an acquaintance that mentioned her love for children and triggered Rousseau’s guilt about his own abandoned children (though modern scholars sometimes doubt he had any children to begin with, his Confessions say he had five by his common-law wife Thérèse and put all of them in orphanages). These recollections argue against a charge no one but he himself has leveled, and they do so by declaring his affection for children, as demonstrated in these casual encounters. The essay is a ruminative defense for an imagined trial. The conclusion shifts the subject to the tribulations his fame has brought him and his inability to walk unrecognized and in peace among people. The implication is that even in this most casual of social exchanges he has been thwarted, so that only the terrain of the reverie leaves him freedom to roam. Most of the book was written while he was living in Paris, isolated by his fame and his suspicion.
If the literature of philosophical walking begins with Rousseau, it is because he is one of the first who thought it worthwhile to record in detail the circumstances of his musing. If he was a radical, his most profoundly radical act was to revalue the personal and the private, for which walking, solitude, and wilderness provided favorable conditions. If he inspired revolutions, revolutions in imagination and culture as well as in political organization, they were for him only necessary to overthrow the impediments to such experience. The full force of his intellect and his most compelling arguments had been made in the cause of recovering and perpetuating such states of mind and life as he describes in Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
In two walks, he recollects the interludes of rural peace he most treasured. In the famous Fifth Walk, he describes the happiness he found on the island of Saint-Pierre on Lake of Bienne, to which he fled after being stoned and driven out of Motiers, near Neuchâtel, where Boswell had visited him. “Wherein lay this great contentment?” he asks rhetorically, and goes on to describe a life in which he owned little and did little, save botanize and boat. It is the Rousseauian peaceable kingdom, privileged enough that no manual labor is required, but without the sophistication and socializing of an aristocratic retreat. The Tenth Walk is a paean to the similar rural happiness he had with his patroness and lover, Louise de Warens, when he was a teenager. It was written when he had finally found a replacement for Saint-Pierre, the estate of Ermenonville. He died at the age of seventy-five, leaving the Tenth Walk unfinished. The marquis de Girardin, Ermenonville’s owner, buried Rousseau on an isle of poplars there and established a pilgrimage for the sentimental devotees who came to pay tribute. It included an itinerary that instructed the visitor not only how to walk through the garden toward the tomb but how to feel. Rousseau’s private revolt was becoming public culture.
III. WALKING AND THINKING AND WALKING
Søren Kierkegaard is the other philosopher who has much to say about walking and thinking. He chose cities—or one city, Copenhagen—as his place to walk and study his human subjects, though he compared his urban tours to rural botanizing: human beings were the specimens he gathered. Born a hundred years later in another Protestant city, he had a life in some ways utterly unlike Rousseau’s: the harsh ascetic standards he set for himself could not be less like Rousseau’s self-indulgence, and he kept to his birthplace, to his family, and to his religion throughout his life, though he quarreled with them all. In other respects—in his social isolation, his prolific writing of works both literary and philosophical, his chafing self-consciousness—the resemblance is strong. The son of a wealthy and grimly devout merchant, Kierkegaard lived off his inheritance and under his father’s thumb for most of his life. In a memory he ascribes to one of his pseudonyms but which is almost certainly his own, he tells of how his father, rather than let him leave the house, would walk back and forth in a room with him, describing the world so vividly that the boy seemed to see all the variety evoked. As the boy grew older, his father let him join in: “What had at first been an epic now became a drama; they conversed in turn. If they were walking along well-known paths they watched one another sharply to make sure that nothing was overlooked; if the way was strange to Johannes, he invented something, whereas the father’s almighty imagination was capable of shaping everything, of using every childish whim as an ingredient of the drama. To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if the father were the Lord God and he was his favorite.”
The triangle between Kierkegaard, his father, and his God would consume his life, and sometimes it seems that he made his God in his father’s image. With these walks in the room, his father seems to be consciously shaping the strange character Kierkegaard would become. He described himself as already an old man in childhood, as a ghost, as a wanderer, and this pacing back and forth seems to have been instruction in living in a disembodied magical realm of the imagination that had only one real inhabitant, himself. Even the myriad pseudonyms under which he published many of his best-known works seem devices to lose himself while revealing himself and to make a crowd out of his solitude. Throughout his adult life, Kierkegaard almost never received guests at home, and indeed, throughout his life he almost never had anyone he could call a friend, though he had a vast acquaintance. One of his nieces says that the streets of Copenhagen were his “reception
room,” and Kierkegaard’s great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters, acquaintances’ greetings, and overheard conversations. A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting. Walking provided Kierkegaard, like Rousseau, with a wealth of casual contacts with his fellow humans, and it facilitated contemplation.
In 1837, just as his literary work was beginning, Kierkegaard wrote, “Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object; without this environment it bleeds to death in the exhausting embrace of an indefinite idea.” He found the same tumult on the street. More than a decade later, he declared in another journal, “In order to bear mental tension such as mine, I need diversion, the diversion of chance contacts on the streets and alleys, because association with a few exclusive individuals is actually no diversion.” In these and other statements, he proposes that the mind works best when surrounded by distraction, that it focuses in the act of withdrawing from surrounding bustle rather than in being isolated from it. He reveled in the turbulent variety of city life, saying elsewhere, “This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing—it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant.”
In his journals, he insists that he composed all his works afoot. “Most of Either/Or was written only twice (besides, of course, what I thought through while walking, but that is always the case); nowadays I like to write three times,” says one passage, and there are many like it protesting that although his extensive walks were perceived as signs of idleness they were in fact the foundation of his prolific work. The recollections of others show him during his pedestrian encounters, but there must have been long solitary intervals in which he could compose his thoughts and rehearse the day’s writing. Perhaps it was that the city strolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively, for his private thoughts are often convolutions of self-consciousness and despair. In a journal passage from 1848, he described how on his way home, “overwhelmed with ideas ready to be written down and in a sense so weak that I could scarcely walk,” he would often encounter a poor man, and if he refused to speak with him, the ideas would flee “and I would sink into the most dreadful spiritual tribulation at the idea that God could do to me what I had done to that man. But if I took the time to talk with the poor man, things never went that way.”
Being out in public gave him almost his only social role, and he fretted over how his performance on the stage of Copenhagen would be interpreted. In a way, his appearances on the street were like his appearances on the printed page: endeavors to be in touch, but not too closely and on his own terms. Like Rousseau, he had an exacting relationship with the public. He chose to publish many of his works under pseudonyms and then to complain that he was considered an idler, since none knew he went home from his roaming to write. After he broke off his engagement with Regine Olsen in what was to be the defining tragedy of his life, he continued to see her on the street but nowhere else. Years later, they would both appear repeatedly at the same time on a portside street, and he worried over what this meant. The street, which is the most casual arena for people with full private lives, was the most personal for him.
The other great crisis of his uneventful life came when he wrote a small attack on Denmark’s scurrilous satirical magazine the Corsair. Though its editor admired him, the magazine began to publish mocking pictures and paragraphs about him, and the Copenhagen public took up the joke. Most of the jokes were mild enough—they depicted him as having trouser legs of uneven lengths, made fun of his elaborate pseudonyms and compositional style, published pictures of him as a spry figure in a frock coat that belled out around his spiky legs. But the parodies made him better known than he wished to be, achingly anxious about being mocked and seeing mockery everywhere. Kierkegaard seems to have exaggerated the effect of the Corsair’s jabs and suffered horribly—not least because he no longer felt free to roam the city. “My atmosphere has been tainted for me. Because of my melancholy and my enormous work I needed a situation of solitude in the crowd in order to rest. So I despair. I can no longer find it. Curiosity surrounds me everywhere.” One of his biographers says that it was this final crisis of his life, after those of his father and his fiancée, that pushed him into his last phase as a theological rather than a philosophical and aesthetic writer. Nevertheless, he continued to walk the streets of Copenhagen, and it was on one of those walks that he collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he died some weeks later.
Like Rousseau, Kierkegaard is a hybrid, a philosophical writer rather than a philosopher proper. Their work is often descriptive, evocative, personal, and poetically ambiguous, in sharp contrast to the closely reasoned argument central to the Western philosophical tradition. It has room for delight and personality and something as specific as the sound of an organ grinder in a street or rabbits on an island. Rousseau branched out into the novel, the autobiography, and the reverie, and play with forms was central to Kierkegaard’s work: creating a massive postscript to a relatively short essay, layering pseudonymous authors like Chinese boxes within his texts. As a writer his heirs seem to be literary experimentalists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, who play with the way form, voice, reference, and other devices shape meaning.
Rousseau and Kierkegaard’s walking is only accessible to us because they wrote about it in more personal, descriptive, and specific works—Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries, Kierkegaard’s journals—rather than staying in the impersonal and universal realm of philosophy at its most pure. Perhaps it is because walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travelers’ accounts, and first-person essays. Too, these eccentrics focus on walking as a means of modulating their alienation, and this kind of alienation was a new phenomenon in intellectual history. They were neither immersed in the society around them nor—save in Kierkegaard’s later years, after the Corsair affair—withdrawn from it in the tradition of the religious contemplative. They were in the world but not of it. A solitary walker, however short his or her route, is unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group.
IV. THE MISSING SUBJECT
In the early twentieth century, a philosopher actually addressed walking directly as something central to his intellectual project. Of course walking had been an example earlier. Kierkegaard liked to cite Diogenes: “When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward as an opponent. He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming he had sufficiently refuted them.” The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world, in his 1931 essay, “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism.” The body, he said, is our experience of what is always here, and the body in motion experiences the unity of all its parts as the continuous “here” that moves toward and through the various “theres.” That is to say, it is the body that moves but the world that changes, which is how one distinguishes the one from the other: travel can be a way to experience this continuity of self amid the flux of the world and thus to begin to understand each and their relationship to each other. Husserl�
�s proposal differs from earlier speculations on how a person experiences the world in its emphasis on the act of walking rather than on the senses and the mind.
Still, this is slim pickings. One would expect that postmodern theory would have much to say about walking, given that mobility and corporeality have been among its major themes—and when corporeality gets mobile, it walks. Much contemporary theory was born out of feminism’s protest at the way earlier theory universalized the very specific experience of being male, and sometimes of being white and privileged. Feminism and postmodernism both emphasize that the specifics of one’s bodily experience and location shape one’s intellectual perspective. The old idea of objectivity as speaking from nowhere—speaking while transcending the particulars of body and place—was laid to rest; everything came from a position, and every position was political (and as George Orwell remarked much earlier, “The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion”). But while dismantling this false universal by emphasizing the role of the ethnic and gendered body in consciousness, these thinkers have apparently generalized what it means to be corporeal and human from their own specific experience—or inexperience—as bodies that, apparently, lead a largely passive existence in highly insulated circumstances.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 4