A Philosophy of Walking (18 page)

There were invariably three dishes and some cheese,
placed on the table – sometimes with a few desserts – along with a small carafe of wine for each guest. Conversation lasted until five o'clock.

Then it was time for his walk. Rain or shine, it had to be taken. He went alone, for he wanted to breathe through his nose all the way, with his mouth closed, which he believed to be excellent for the body. The company of friends would have obliged him to open his mouth to speak.

He always took the same route, so consistently that his itinerary through the park later came to be called ‘The Philosopher's Walk'. According to rumour he only ever altered the route of this daily constitutional twice in his life: to obtain an early copy of Rousseau's
Émile
, and to join the scramble for hot news after the announcement of the French Revolution. On returning from his walk, he read until ten o'clock, then went to bed (he only ate one meal a day), falling asleep immediately.

That low-key walk, without any big mystical union with Nature, that walk without pleasure, but taken as a hygienic necessity, that one-hour walk, but taken every day, every single day without exception, brings to light three important aspects of walking.

The first is monotony. Walking is monotonous, severely monotonous. The great walking narratives (from Rodolphe Töpffer's ‘zigzag journeys' to Michel Vieuchange's ‘travel logs') can only maintain our interest through their account of misadventures, sudden encounters, painful hardships. In these epics of pilgrimage or exploration, there are always many more pages devoted to halts than to the
travelling itself. Events are never part of the walking, they are interruptions. For walking is monotonous by itself. It isn't ‘interesting', and children know it. Basically, walking is always the same, putting one foot in front of the other. But the secret of that monotony is that it constitutes a remedy for boredom. Boredom is immobility of the body confronted with emptiness of mind. The repetitiveness of walking eliminates boredom, for, with the body active, the mind is no longer affected by its lassitude, no longer draws from its inertia the vague vertigo of an endless spiral. In a state of boredom one is always seeking
something to do
, despite the obvious futility of any activity. When walking, there is always something to do: walk. Or rather, no, there's nothing more to do because one is just walking, and when one is going to a place or covering a route, one has only to keep moving. That is boringly obvious. The body's monotonous duty liberates thought. While walking, one is not obliged to think, to think this or that or like this or like that. During that continuous but automatic effort of the body, the mind is placed at one's disposal. It is then that thoughts can
arise
, surface or take shape.

The second aspect pivots around regularity. What impresses in Kant is his iron discipline. Every day that same walk, the accompaniment and symbol of the hours spent working each day. Every day a page to write, a thought to develop, a proof to add, a demonstration to perfect. And at the end of it all, a gigantic oeuvre. Of course, he also had to have something to think and say in the first place. But what impresses here is the output, the idea of a gigantism
produced through repeated effort, a small repeated action: a discipline. The work was not produced in a flash of inspiration suspending time, but built up stone by stone. As when, after three or four days' walk, you look back from the top of a pass and make out in the far distance your point of departure. That distance, that remoteness stolen by the tiny distance of a stride, one stride after another, with unending perseverance. Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate repetition of the possible.

The third and last aspect has to do with the inescapable. It was known that at five in the afternoon he was going to come out and take his walk. It was like an immutable ritual, as regular and fundamental as the sunrise. What the idea of the inescapable adds to that of regularity is inevitability, but a mastered inevitability that one imposes
by means of
. Through discipline it can happen that one becomes one's own destiny. There is a sort of threshold of the will, which, at the end of twenty, thirty or forty years, bends our efforts towards a necessity that would hang over us, almost, if we were not preoccupied with its construction.

The inescapable is there to show that discipline is not only a passive habit. It makes us feel a destiny of will, through which Nietzsche defined freedom. The inescapable thing about walking is that once started, one is forced to arrive. There is no other way, one has to progress. And at the end of the fatigue and the road, one
always
arrives, it's enough to add up the hours and think:
Let's go!
It was written, unchangeable. When you are on foot, to arrive you must walk. Will as destiny.

Strolls
 

O
f course you walk during leisurely strolls. During a promenade or stroll, the act of walking lacks the density of long excursions, but other dimensions can be felt, more humble, less suited to grand mystical poses, metaphysical frauds and pretentious declarations. They are: the promenade as an absolute ritual, the creation of a childish soul; the promenade as free relaxation, mental recreation; the promenade as rediscovery.

The outings of our childhood were a ritual. They required well-trodden routes, strictly bounded timetables. Not just going out for a random stroll, not just
an
outing, but
this
or
that
outing. To children, they don't seem similar in the least. They take different paths, the hedges
that line them are unique, as are the views. They don't intersect.

Growing up means becoming sensitive only to generalities, to similarities, to genres of being. Forests, mountains, plains. In your own neighbourhood, too, everything becomes alike: to us adults, each path is bound up, contained, in the same broad landscape. The adult sees everything from the height of his years. The outlook born of experience flattens everything, piles it together, renders it dull. It all comes down to the same. He knows his house is situated in a country, and that several roads lead to it.

To a child, roads have an intimidating, unnerving side, they are potential different worlds. They do not resemble one another: they open onto distinct universes. The child has already noticed that no two trees are the same: their knotty branches, their twisted trunks, their outlines all differentiate them. Not two mulberries or two oaks, but the knight and the wizard, the monster and the child. So what can be said about two outings, each with its unique succession of trees, of characters, the colours of its paths, the people one might meet there? Each outing has a separate story, each opens into a different kingdom, differently inhabited, differently haunted.

Proust as a child had two outings that made two worlds: by Swann's house (or by Méséglise), and to Guermantes: maps of two complete worlds, with their seasons, their sounds, their duration, their colours. Thus, by Swann's house was the outing risked even in threatening weather since it was
short, the festoons of lilacs to be gently embraced, the hawthorns with their intoxicating scent, Swann's park where sometimes there might appear from between hedges of jasmine, the scoffing young girl Gilberte, impenetrable and wily.

The Guermantes outing involved leaving by the back door at the end of the garden, and needed reliable weather because it led far off. Guermantes was essentially a fabulous destination, never reached, but the walk passed the banks of the Vivonne (where one could sometimes sit down beside the water, among irises), and that house buried in the woods on whose windowsill an elegant woman, sad and pensive, sometimes leaned her elbow. And there were small damp clearings where ‘clusters of dark flowers' climbed.

Two separate worlds. Albertine, much later, was to shock the Narrator by suggesting that they go to Guermantes by way of Méséglise … Scandal, aberration, horrors! The objective realities of geography smash head-on into the clean, crystalline perceptions of childhood. To a child, an outing is a complete identity, a face, an individual. It isn't routes that intersect at a junction, or paths under an unchanging sky. Doubtless it was possible, from the belfry of Saint-Hilaire, to make out the routes of both outings at once, from a single viewpoint, bathed in the colour of a single landscape, a single light. But that overview is falsely superior, of interest only to an abstract gaze seeing roads as lines on a map. A child, who lives at ground level, knows that the shapes of the stones, the outlines of the trees, the scents of the flowers, are all different.

And we oughtn't to be contrasting the imaginative, dreamy outlook of children with the realism and objectivity of adults. It is children who are the true realists: they never proceed from generalities. The adult recognizes the general form in a particular example, a representative of the species, dismisses everything else and states: that's lilac, there's an ash tree, an apple tree. The child perceives individuals, personalities. He sees the unique form, and doesn't mask it with a common name or function. When you walk with children, they enable you to see the fabulous beasts in tree foliage, to smell the sweetness of blossoms. It isn't a triumph of the imagination, but an unprejudiced, total realism. And Nature becomes instantly poetic. These outings are the absolute reign of childhood. You lose its charm in growing up, because you end by acquiring ideas and certainties about everything, and no longer want to know more of things than their objective representation (sadly called their ‘truth').

Well beyond childhood, there exists a style of outing that is just as dreamy, although less poetic. I refer to the stroll as light relief, relaxation: walking to ‘get some fresh air'. After a gruelling work session, or when the boredom becomes too much, people go off for a walk to ‘have a think'. Especially when the contrast becomes too strong between a spring sun, brisk air outside and the stuffy, gloomy atmosphere of an office. A German philosopher described this art tactfully and with great precision.

In
Die Promenade als Kunstwerk
(‘The Art of Walking', 1802), Karl Gottlob Schelle effectively established that walking
undoubtedly produced a relaxing effect on the body – literally so, since, free of the crouching posture imposed by work, it could stand up straight; but it was really the mind that rejoiced most. For walking does bring a sort of relaxation to the soul. While working, you have to remain the captive of your subject, stay shackled to your task, think of only one thing at a time. The seated body can't move about much, and when engaged in effort must keep its movements exact, the working of its muscles coordinated. In this way work always results in a state of nervous irritation, due to forced and prolonged concentration.

Nevertheless, a walk doesn't signify a quick rest, a simple pause, as if it were simply a matter of
stopping
. It is rather a matter of a change in rhythm: it unshackles the body's limbs along with the mind's faculties. Walking in the first place means defying the constraints: choosing your route, your pace and your representations. Schelle was said to be a friend of Kant. One can also tell that he read his work: he comes up with a complete Kantian aesthetic, applied to walking.

An outing is not the same thing as a brisk trot around the block, which is really just another way of developing the obsession with some idea or the thread of a meditation. After all, I can easily get up and walk about when I am held up by a problem. But then I don't necessarily go far, I take a few paces, hands behind back and shaking my head, and as soon as the motion of the body has given a little more spring to the mind – solving the problem, finding the ideal arrangement, building the correct demonstration, seizing
the good idea – then I rush back to my desk, until the next blockage.

Going out for a walk is another matter: you say goodbye to your work. You close the books and files, and you go out. Once outside, the body moves at its own rhythm and the mind feels free, in other words, available. I turn my head towards the impressions that attract me to the right side of the landscape, I harmonize them with the ones I receive from the left, I play with colour contrasts, I pass from detail to overall view in a continuous back-and-forth scanning process. And if I am on an ample walk in a public park already filled with a motley crowd, I observe, but without the mind being applied: I let my gaze slide from one face to another, from a dress to a hat, without allowing myself to be caught anywhere, never retaining more than a shape, a line, an expression. It is that free composition of the theatre of appearances that Kant calls aesthetic pleasure: the imagination playing with impressions, combining and recomposing them at the whim of one's unfettered fantasy. It's totally gratuitous, and by that means the mind displays its deep internal harmony: all the faculties in spontaneous agreement to play freely together at putting the spectacle of the world into proper form.