A Philosophy of Walking (4 page)

Then too, during very long walks, there is always that emergence through a high pass where another landscape appears all of a sudden. After the effort, the long climb, the body turns round and sees at its feet the offered immensity; or, at a turn in the path, it witnesses a transformation: a range of mountains, a splendour lying in wait. Many aphorisms are built on these reversals of perspective, these final exclamations where something else is unveiled, the secret of a discovery like a new landscape, and the jubilation that accompanies it.

Finally it is worth mentioning what Eternal Recurrence owes to the experience of walking (bearing in mind, too, that Nietzsche's long excursions were made on known paths, signposted routes that he liked to repeat). When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker's body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration
of the presences. The walker's immobility facing that of the landscape … it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.

By the middle of the 1880s, however, Nietzsche was complaining that he couldn't walk as well as he should. He was suffering from back pain and had to spend long periods reclining in a chair. He persisted nevertheless, but his walks became shorter. Sometimes he even took companions along. The ‘hermit of Sils', as he was called, began often to walk in the company of protectresses, young female admirers: Helen Zimmern who had translated his text on Schopenhauer, Meta von Salis, a young aristocrat who brought him the heavyweight endorsement of the local nobility, the student Resa von Schirnhofer, and Hélène Druscowitz, newly awakened to philosophy.

These less solitary walks were no longer the same. Nietzsche increasingly played the urbane gent, the gallant surrounded by cultivated women. He took them to see the rock where he had received illumination on Eternal Recurrence, confided poignantly on his friendship with Wagner. And pain slowly took hold of him once more: from 1886 he was complaining of horribly prolonged migraine attacks. The vomiting reappeared too. After each excursion he needed several days to recover. Sometimes a long walk left him exhausted for days.

Towns increasingly disgusted him: he found them dirty and expensive. During his winter sojourns in Nice, he could not afford to pay for south-facing rooms, and suffered from the cold. At Sils, in summer, the weather often seemed bad to him. Venice he found atrociously depressing. His condition worsened.

There was one last metamorphosis. The final act of his life opened like a song of renewal, an ode to joy: he discovered Turin for the first time in April 1888. It was like a revelation: the city was absolutely classical ‘for the feet as for the eyes – and what cobblestones!' Long walks on the banks of the Po enchanted him. After a final summer at Sils, grimmer than ever, he returned to Turin in September. The same miracle, a renewal of joy.

There was a sudden access of happiness, and of magnificent health. The ailments all went away as if by magic, and he now felt his body only as a lightness, a bounding momentum. He was working quickly and well. His eyes no longer hurt; his stomach could digest anything. In a few months he dashed off several books, like a powder-train. He walked with passionate dedication, in the evening accumulating notes for his planned four works on the ‘transvaluation of values'.

But early in 1889, Jacob Burckhardt received a letter from Nietzsche dated 6 January. It worried him: it was the letter of one demented, a madman (‘In the final analysis, I would rather have been a professor at Basle than God; but I hesitated to take egotism to the point of dispensing with the creation of the world'). Other letters sent in that first week
of January reveal the same state. Nietzsche signed himself Dionysus, or the Crucified (‘once discovered, it was easy for you to find me; the difficulty henceforth will be to lose me').

Burckhardt immediately informed Overbeck, who hurried to Turin, where he struggled to find Nietzsche in his small lodging in Davide Fino's house. His landlords were at a loss: Nietzsche had become uncontrollable. He had clung, weeping, to the neck of a horse whose driver had whipped the animal. He had wandered around mumbling incoherent ideas, harangued passers-by, and gate-crashed funerals, claiming to be the deceased. Overbeck found Nietzsche slumped in an armchair, haggard, looking in dismay at the proofs of his latest book. He looked up and, seeing his old friend, sprang up in surprise and embraced him: he had recognized him. And he wept, held on and wept; as if, Overbeck wrote, he could see the abyss opening beneath him. Then he sat down and curled up once more.

Nietzsche had become extremely grand: apparently he was a prince and was owed every courtesy. He was coaxed, bawling songs and shouting, to the station and into a train. He was mad. His friends managed to get him as far as Basle by saying that His Excellency was awaited there for a reception worthy of him.

He was admitted to the clinic in Basle, then was sent from there to Jena, without noticeable improvement. Eventually his mother took him in, at Naumburg. She cared for him until her own death with love, patience and devotion. She washed and tidied him, consoled him, took him for walks, watched over him night and day. For seven years.

Nietzsche increasingly walled himself up in silence, or made incoherent speeches. His sentences were shreds, vestiges; he no longer thought. Sometimes, still, he improvised for a while on the piano. He no longer had migraines, or eye trouble.

His mother understood that only long walks did him any good. But it wasn't easy: he would take against passers-by in the street, utter meaningless bellows. She soon shortened their outings, because she was ashamed, ashamed of her big forty-four-year-old son who roared like a bear, or cursed into the wind. Sometimes she would take him out in the late afternoon, when people were indoors and he could yell without upsetting anyone.

Soon, however, the body itself became obstructive: paralysis crept gradually through his spine. He was back in a wheelchair in which people pushed him around, took him out. He stared at his hands for hours at a time, first one, then the other, or held books upside down, mumbling. He lay helpless in a chair, while others bustled around him. He had regressed to childhood. His mother wheeled him up and down the verandah. After autumn 1894 he could only recognize his immediate family, his mother and sister, and remained prostrate, usually motionless, staring at his hands. Very rarely he would say something: ‘When all is said and done, death'; ‘I don't sow horses'; ‘More light'.

The decline was slow, ineluctable. His eyes sank into his skull, their gaze vertiginously withdrawn. He died on 25 August 1900, in Weimar.

Outside
 

W
alking means being out of doors, outside, ‘in the fresh air', as they say. Walking causes the inversion of town-dweller's logics, and even of our most widespread condition.

When you go ‘outside' it is always to pass from one ‘inside' to another: from house to office, from your place to the nearest shops. You go out to do something, somewhere else. Outside is a transition: the thing that separates; almost an obstacle between here and there. But one that has no value of its own. You make it from your place to the tube station in all weathers, with a hurried body, a mind still half-occupied with domestic details but already projected towards work obligations, legs galloping while the hand
nervously checks the pockets to ensure nothing has been forgotten. Outside hardly exists: it is like a big separating corridor, a tunnel, an immense airlock.

It's true that you can go out sometimes just to ‘get some air'; some relief from the weighty immobility of objects and walls. Because you feel stifled indoors, you take a breather while the sun is shining out there; it just seems unfair to deny yourself the exposure to light. Then, yes, you go out and take a step round the block, simply to be outside rather than to go here or there. To feel the lively freshness of a spring breeze, or the fragile warmth of winter sunshine. An interlude, a managed pause. Children, too, go out just for the sake of it. ‘Going out' at that age means playing, running, laughing. Later it will mean seeing their friends, escaping from parents, doing something different. But more often than not, once again outside is placed between two insides: a stage, a transition. It is some space that takes some time.

Outside. Out of doors. In walks that extend over several days, during major expeditions, everything is inverted. ‘Outside' is no longer a transition, but the element in which stability exists. It's the other way round: you go from lodging to lodging, shelter to shelter, and the thing that changes is the infinitely variable ‘indoors'. You never sleep twice in the same bed, different hosts put you up each night. Every new décor, every change in ambiance, is a new surprise; the variety of walls, of stones. You stop: the body is tired, night is falling, you need rest. But these interiors are milestones every time, means to help keep you outside for longer: transitions.

Another thing worth mentioning is the strange impression made by your first steps, in the morning. You have looked at the map, chosen your route, said your goodbyes, packed your rucksack, identified the right path, checked its direction. It seems like a kind of hesitation, trampling about slightly, back and forth, as it were punctuations: stopping, checking the direction, turning around on the spot. Then the path opens, you head off, pick up the rhythm. You lift your head, you're on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That's it, that's all, and you're there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there. You leave one lodging for another, but continuity, what lasts and persists, comes from the surrounding landscapes, the chains of hills that are always there. And it is I who wind through them, I stroll there as if at home: by walking, I take the measure of my dwelling. The obligatory passages, which you traverse and leave behind, are bedrooms for one night, dining rooms for one dinner and one breakfast, the people who run them, the ghosts that inhabit them; but not the landscape.

That is how the big separation between outside and inside is turned upside down by walking. We shouldn't say that we cross mountains and plains, and that we stop at lodgings. It is almost the opposite: for several days I live in a landscape, I slowly take possession of it, I make it my site.

Then that strange morning impression can arise, when you have left the walls of rest behind you, and find yourself with the wind on your face, right in the middle of the world: this is really my home all day long, this is where I am going to dwell by walking.

Slowness