Walking Before Midnight

 “A Philosophy of Walking” by Frederic Gros, 2015

Do we really need a ‘philosophy of walking?’  If you were hoping for a somewhat well-grounded book about walking, you are out of luck.  This is not a meditation on walking so much as a description and riff off of famous artistic and philosophical walkers.  In that it is somewhat pretentious and dated, but it is written by an expert on post-modernist French philosophy - so it figures.  He romantically describes the mountain rambles of Nietzsche, the vagabond travels of Rimbaud, the nature worship of Thoreau and Rousseau, several chapters on Christian pilgrims, the poet Nerval, the philosopher Kant, the politician Gandhi, the poet Wordsworth and, in an attempt to be somewhat modern, mentions of ‘Buddhist’ hipsters Snyder and Kerouac.

Yet if you are a hiker through woods or hills or mountains or beaches, a tent camper, a town wanderer, a hitchhiker, a dog walker, an environmentalist, a writer, musician, painter, photographer or thinker, there is still something here.  Oddly, Gros seems to distain wandering in a city.  He has little to say about group walks or dog walks and would look down on step calculators.  He sees walking as a release from care which enables thinking, preferably done in solitary, certainly over several days in nature, best on mountains. So he’s really enamored with overnight hiking at higher elevations, but allows for city strolls and ‘promenades.'

Europe has a much older walking culture than the U.S., which prefers gasoline to get around.  It has many well-organized trails with shelters.  On the other hand many U.S. children whine when taken on walks. After all, walking is a form of work. Many adults never walk anywhere except from their car to the grocery store. Only recently in the U.S. has traversing the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Coast Trail and shorter ones become bragging, film and photo/selfie opportunities.  Gros himself misses the fact that hiking has become a media event on You Tube and other sites, and still thinks walkers shed society. They do not. Gros does not see how walking is related to current traveling. Travel actually forces people to walk.  Nor does he mention the carbon benefit of walking.  Many gaps here, given a dated, overly-intellectual approach.

Gros favors slowness in a walk, to imbibe the surroundings, not the hurried jockiness of fast walking.  He understands that feet and gravity become the elemental points of contact between human and earth. Walking embraces monotony and repetition, but Gros never mentions it as physical exercise.  Pray no! He points out that in normal life ‘the outside’ has become a dead, transitional space between interior places.  He is perhaps unaware of the many people who work outside all day, or who spend extensive time in their backyards, on beaches, in woods or lakes during an average day.  Many see ‘fresh air’ as an escape, as he does too. I guess his academic office job in Paris is confining and that is the template for everyone.

Gros describes the old promenades in the Tuileries gardens, where the wealthy paraded their fine clothing and accoutrements, similar to the strolls of the early rich down certain city boulevards – Nevsky Prospect, Champs Elysees, 5^th Avenue.  Another urban walker is the Parisian ‘flaneur’ – who is not in a hurry, who peeks into every nook and crevice without buying, a Situationist or Surrealist wanderer isolated in the city ... not a thief on the look-out for loose things and open doors.

FAMOUS WALKERS

The delirious misanthrope Nietzsche spent 10 good years mountain walking, which helped him to write, this after a predictable stint as a professor.  Then his body gave out and he ended up in an insane asylum.  As a young man, the poet Rimbaud walked to various cities in Belgium and France, even crossing the Alps, and sustained long treks in the desert near Aden, until his body too collapsed.  Rimbaud walked because he was poor, not because he was necessarily a ‘walker.’  His desire to ‘walk’ was really a desire to escape from wherever he was.  Both these stories show how health is crucial to the mere ability to get around like this ... a material fact Gros skips.  Workers who work physical labor might shy from walking, as they’ve already tramped thousands of steps doing a warehouse job.  Nor is the endless shuffling and outdoor life of the homeless or the long trek of migrants to el Norte or Europe relevant to Gros.  They are invisible in this romantacist assemblage.

Thoreau took hours-long daily walks around Concord, avoiding work as part of his tradition of frugality. Thoreau mediates on early morning, spring and winter walks.  He could do this party because his father was a pencil manufacturer, his patron the monied writer Emerson. Rousseau had 3 periods of walking – in early youth, in middle age after rejecting society for a time, and in ‘old’ age – at 60.  For Rousseau it was a function of individualism and being present as a natural man outside society, a society which Gros paints as wholly evil. The poet Nerval was also a walker – getting lost in Paris or farther afield.  These melancholy walks ended one day in suicide.  You could set your watch and map on the timing and path taken by Kant on his daily 5 P.M. strolls in Konigsberg.  Proust had two walks, to Swann’s house and the country villa of the Guermantes, which both show up in his books. There are Wordsworth’s ground-breaking poetic rambles in the English shires, which evidently made walking  'respectable' over and above Romani, highwaymen and tinkers.  Gandhi walked into history in his sandals and staff by going to the sea in a ‘march for salt,’ as a way to oppose the British salt tax.  Gandhi frequently walked in London and organized marches in the Transvaal.  This is similar to the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, the Chinese Red Army’s Long March, Sherman’s March to the Sea or the deadly Cherokee/Creek Trail of Tears, the Bataan Death March, the Armenian expulsion and many other historic ‘walks’ that are not mentioned.

The Greek philosophers, especially the Cynics, walked frequently.  The Cynics went from Greek town square to town square with a staff, a blanket and a bag, shoeless, like early pilgrims.  Gros also has two chapters on Christian pilgrims traveling on foot to visit relics in France, Jerusalem and Spanish Compostela. These chapters really set the tone of the book, which has the archaic psychic and textual character of something written 150 years ago or more.

This book might inspire a reader to do more walking, but there are other books, like “In Praise of Walking,” that cover this issue without this antiquated, bourgeois and overly romanticized approach.  May Day carries “In Praise of Walking” too.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Wild,” “Travel Notes – St. Petersburg,” “A Walk Through Paris,” “The Dharma Bums” (Kerouac);“Black Rain,” “Left in London,” “Time is Right For Riding in the Streets,” “Postcards From the End of America,” “The Irish Literary Trail,” “Walking With the Comrades” (Roy); “The Beach Beneath the Street – the Life and Times of the Situationist International,” “A Travelers Tale,” “The Dark Heart of Italy,” “The Listening Point” (Olson); “Into the Wild,” “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” (Solnit).

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 15, 2022