A Philosophy of Walking (11 page)

What he saw, Thoreau wrote, he made his own: he meant that one stores when walking vivid feelings and sunny memories, for the winter evenings. Our treasure, our real property, is the quantity of representations that we have taken in and conserved.

But
it is still easier to acquire wealth than to get rid of it
. The property owner's soul becomes encrusted, encysted, calloused from rubbing against material goods, while the heart of the poor man contracts with envy and rage at not having them. The rich man soon finds it very painful to be deprived of comfort – the hard wooden chair instead of the soft sofa, the impossibility of sleeping in the cold, the fatigue of walking 500 yards. As for the poor man, he remains the prisoner of his wishes for prosperity, and continues to believe in wealth. No, really, wealth costs far too many people far too much. Thoreau, that heroic walker – three to five hours every day – was anything but a great traveller. He did undertake a few long excursions in the forests of Maine, in Quebec and New Hampshire. But the experience of walking he writes about, which nourishes his discourse, never concerns anything but his long daily strolls around Concord, setting off from home, hands in pockets. A small-time adventurer, one might think … but in reality he is warning us against the danger of exoticism. You see so many people who strike out far afield to recount their adventures ‘out there': the necessarily fabulous encounters, the compulsory epic events, the invariably sublime landscapes, the obviously amazing food.
Performances every time, then: in narrative, in adventure, in the extreme. And yet, Thoreau's
Walden
would fascinate people more than all the travellers' tales ever told. There is a palpable radicalism in the conversion that makes those grandiloquent extreme-adventurers' epics seem dull. It cannot be said too often: there's no need to go far to walk. The true direction of walking is not towards otherness (other worlds, other faces, other cultures, other civilizations); it is towards the edge of civilized worlds, whatever they may be. Walking is setting oneself apart: at the edge of those who work, at the edges of high-speed roads, at the edge of the producers of profit and poverty, exploiters, labourers, and at the edge of those serious people who always have something better to do than receive the pale gentleness of a winter sun or the freshness of a spring breeze.

Walking is a matter not just of truth, but also of reality. To walk is to experience the real. Not reality as pure physical exteriority or as what might count as a subject, but reality as what holds good: the principle of solidity, of resistance. When you walk you prove it with every step: the earth holds good. With every pace, the entire weight of my body finds support and rebounds, takes a spring. There is everywhere a solid base somewhere underfoot.

Always when climbing, you have to make sure of your footing: there's always an imperceptible moment when you press down, to feel whether the ground resists. Then, with confidence, you place your whole body-weight on one foot, before putting down the other which had advanced through the air. What makes the legs tremble is a snow-covered
path, where the sinking foot may find ice beneath; or again soil that is too dried-out, stony or sandy, where the body is forced to support itself continuously, to drag itself upward. So one shouldn't walk, but rather dance. The softness of soil irritates the foot, worries it. Inversely, paved surfaces are too hard: they resound like drums, they send the impact of each pace up through the body, when earth would absorb and swallow it. The perfect evenness of tarred roads ends by boring the foot: reality is not so monotonous.

Some decide to devote the same amount of time to writing as to reading. Thoreau, Emerson recalls, had made it a principle to give no more time to writing than he had to walking. To avoid the pitfalls of culture and libraries; for otherwise, what one writes is filled with the writing of others. For all that those others in turn had written on the books of yet others … Writing ought to be this: testimony to a wordless, living experience. Not the commentary on another book, not the exegesis of another text. The book as witness … but witness in the sense of the baton in a relay race.
^*
Thus does the book, born out of experience, refer to that experience. Books are not to teach us how to live (that is the sad task of lesson-givers), but to make us want to live, to live
differently
: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle. Life is uninspiring between two books (going through the monotonous, necessary, everyday motions between two readings), but the book raises the hope of a
different existence. So it shouldn't be what enables us to escape the greyness of everyday life (the everyday is life as something repeated, as the Same), but what enables us to pass from one life to
another
.

‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.'

This writing of reality has to be sought: by only writing in the aftermath of those solidly marked, hammered paces. Because then, in thought too, one seeks only what is solid. By that I mean: write only what has been lived, intensely. Make experience your only solid foundation.

Reality when you are walking is not only the solidity of the earth underfoot, but a test of your own firmness. Thoreau insists repeatedly that when walking, it is also his
own
reality that is at issue. Because a man then feels that he is
natural
, rather than
in Nature
. There is no suggestion here of ‘communion' or ‘fusion'. Those expressions are better suited to big mystical experiences, in which thought is simultaneously completed and wiped out in a vision of Totality. No, walking gives you
participation
: feeling the vegetable, mineral and animal aspects in yourself. I feel made from the
same wood as the tree whose bark I touch in passing, the same tissue as the tall grasses I brush against, and my heavy breathing, when I stop, matches the panting of the hare that stops suddenly before me.

That reality test maintained all day long, through the solidity of the ground, but also through the consistency of my own being echoed in the profusion surrounding me, results in my own case in an abundance of confidence. Walking, as they say, ‘empties the mind'. In another way, walking
fills
the mind with a different sense of purpose. Not connected with ideas or doctrines, not in the sense of a head full of phrases, quotations, theories: but full of the world's presence. That presence which, during the walk, in successive strata, has been deposited in the soul throughout the day.

And when evening comes, one hardly needs to think: just breathe, close your eyes and feel on your body the layers of landscape dissolving and recomposing … The colour of the sky, the flash of leaves, the outlines of the jumbled hills. What may be called confidence here is not solid and hopeful, but rather a quiet certainty. Thus the man who walks all day has become certain by nightfall.

That confidence also has its source in the energies of morning. Thoreau, in all his work, wants to believe in mornings, or rather: it's the morning that instils belief. You must always start at dawn when you walk, to accompany the awakening day. And in that undecided blue hour or so, you feel as it were the first unformed babblings of presence. Walking in the morning confronts us with the
poverty of our wishes, in the sense that wishing is the opposite of accompaniment. I mean that following a rising morning, step by step, is anything but a sudden extraction, a brutal reversal, or a decision. The facts of daytime emerge slowly. Soon the sun will rise and everything will begin. The harshness of voluntary, solemn, talkative conversions betrays their fragility. Daytime never starts with an act of will: it arises in unworried certainty. To walk in the early morning is to understand the strength of natural beginnings.

Thoreau's love of mornings is reflected in his exaltation of springtime, when he recounts for example how in April, the ice on Walden Pond melts and disintegrates with the pressure of new energies, how ways open and routes are invented on the river. But most of all, what he finds on some mornings and in every spring is the principle of renewal of the eternal.

‘The year beginning with younger hope than ever!'

The eternal youthfulness of true hope comes from not being subjected to any condition, any verification, any test: from knowing that there is more in the form of hopefulness than in its content. Because hopefulness, basically, is a
matter of belief rather than knowledge. To believe, to hope, to dream, beyond any achievement, any lesson, any past. Nature has no history: its memory goes back a year and no further. What Thoreau calls the experience of springtime is that of being swept away in the current of a pure affirmation, a wild thrust, in which nothing counts but wanting to live. Another experience, as he says, of innocence: everything recommences, everything sets off once more, and the dawn banishes the past along with the night.

‘In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.'

When you are walking in the springtime, or at dawn, you are watchful, alert, mind stretched towards the rising day, and nothing matters but that slow affirmation. The walker has no history either, that baggage too heavy for the journey. When you walk in the morning, you have no memory. Only the joyous confidence that day will pierce the foliage of night.

‘The sun is but a morning star.'

Among the sources of morning, we find the West. The East is where our memory resides: the East is culture and books, history and old defeats. There is nothing to be learned from the past, because learning from that means repeating former errors. That is why one shouldn't put one's trust in old people, or settle for their so-called experience which is nothing but the weighty mass of their repeated mistakes. One should trust only confidence itself: youth. The sources of the future lie in the West.

‘We go eastward to realize history, and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race, – we go
westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.'

The West is a lode, the preparation of the future, a resource of being, the unopened, the ever new. But the West is also
The Wild
. The Wild is unexploited, virgin Nature, a primary, inhuman force (and non-academic: few poets, Thoreau says, know how to depict ‘the west side of the mountains'), but it is also the undaunted, rebellious part of us, the part that hasn't given up on living: pure affirmation. When Emerson wrote of Thoreau that he was the most American of Americans, perhaps that is what he meant: the fascination with a primitive wilderness that can be the source of the future. The future lies in the West, Thoreau says: he can only get moving, open himself, become possible again after an immersion in the wilderness, a confrontation with it. Perhaps that is the difference between the American utopia and European musings on the wilderness. To us Europeans, the wilderness is associated with origins: an immemorial fault, permanently open, an obscure starting point. It's the ancestral place to which we may want to return, which sometimes comes up at us, but is our definitive past. For Thoreau the American, the wilderness is located in the West, before him. It is the possibility of the future. The wilderness is not the night of European memory, but the morning of the world and of humanity.

‘The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.'

That is why walking leads to a total loss of interest in
what is called – laughably no doubt – the ‘news', one of whose main features is that it becomes old as soon as it is uttered. Once caught in the rhythm, Thoreau says, you are on the treadmill: you want to know what comes next. The real challenge, though, is not to know what has changed, but to get closer to what remains
eternally new
. So you should replace reading the morning papers with a walk. News items replace one another, become mixed up together, are repeated and forgotten. But the truth is that as soon as you start walking, all that noise, all those rumours, fade out. What's new? Nothing: the calm eternity of things, endlessly renewed.

The life Thoreau led – a life of resistance (Emerson recounts that his first response to any request was to say no, that he always found it easier to refuse than to assent), but also of radical choices: working only for what was necessary, walking daily at length, avoiding entanglement in the social game – was quickly judged by others (the upright, the hardworking, the propertied) to be pretty peculiar. However, it was combined with a quest for truth and authenticity. Seeking truth means going beyond appearances. It means denouncing manners and mores, traditions, the everyday, as so many conventions, hypocrisies and lies.

‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.'

A true life is always another life, a different life. Truth brings rupture, it lies to the West: to reinvent ourselves, we must find within us, under the pack-ice of received certainties and immobile opinions, the current of the wild, the one that wells up, escapes, overflows. We are prisoners
of ourselves. People talk of the tyranny of public opinion, but that is nothing, Thoreau says, compared to personal opinion. We are shackled by our own judgements. Thoreau walked (towards the West, but one always heads westward when walking properly) not to find himself, but always to be in a position to reinvent himself.