## Metadata - Author: [[Frederic Gros, Clifford Harper, and John Howe]] - Full Title: A Philosophy of Walking - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=388)) - Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly. ([Location 613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=613)) - However, complete solitude is not absolutely essential. You can be with up to three or four … with no more than that, you can still walk without talking. Everyone walks at their own speed, slight gaps build up, and the leader can turn around from time to time, pause for a moment, call ‘Everything all right?’ in a detached, automatic, almost indifferent way. The reply might be a wave of the hand. Hands on hips, the others may await the slowest; then they will start again, and the order changes. The rhythms come and go, crossing one another. Going at your own pace doesn’t mean walking in an absolutely uniform, regular manner; the body is not a machine. It allows itself slight relaxations or moments of affirmative joy. So with up to three or four people, walking allows these moments of shared solitude. For solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight. ([Location 617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=617)) - With more than four companions, the party becomes a colony, an army on the march. Shouts, whistles, people go from one to another, wait for each other, form groups which soon become clans. Everyone boasts about their equipment. When it’s time to eat, they want you to ‘taste this’, they produce culinary treats, outbid each other … It’s hell. No longer simple or austere: a piece of society transplanted to the mountains. ([Location 623](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=623)) - It’s impossible to be alone when walking, with so many things under our gaze which are given to us through the inalienable grasp of contemplation. The intoxication of the promontory when, after a struggle, we have reached the rocky point and sat down, and when the prospect, the landscape is given to us at last. All those fields, houses, forests, paths, all ours, for us. We have mastered all that by our ascent, and it only remains to rejoice in that mastery. Who could feel alone when he possesses the world? Seeing, dominating, looking mean possessing. But without the inconveniences of ownership: one benefits from the world’s spectacle almost as a thief. But not a thief altogether: for to climb one has to work. ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=633)) - when walking you earn the sympathy of all the living things that surround us: trees and flowers. That is why you go walking sometimes, just to pay a visit – to green glades, groves of trees, violet-shaded valleys. You think after a few days, months or years: it’s really been too long since I went there last. It’s expecting me, I should go there on foot. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=648)) - Lastly, you are not alone because when you walk you soon become two. Especially after walking for a long time. What I mean is that even when I am alone, there is always this dialogue between the body and the soul. When the walking is steady and continuous, I encourage, praise, congratulate: good legs, carrying me along … almost patting my thigh, as one pats the withers of a horse. During those long moments of effort, when the body strains, I am there to support it: come on, keep it up, of course you can. When I walk, I soon become two. My body and me: a couple, an old story. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=652)) - It’s impossible to walk alone for too long like that, in the crushing silence of immense blocks of stone: your own tread echoes with incredible violence. Here your breathing, moving body is a scandal, a spot of life in a cold, haughty, definitive, eternal minerality that rejects it. It happens too on days of rain or fog, when you can’t see anything, and are just a body, perished with cold and advancing in the middle of nowhere. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=664)) - One always walks in silence. Once you have left streets, populated roads, public spaces (all that speed, jostling and clamour, the clatter of thousands of footsteps, the white noise of shouts and murmurs, snatches of words, the rumble and whir of engines), silence is retrieved, initially as a transparency. All is calm, expectant and at rest. You are out of the world’s chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=671)) - Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun. Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. ([Location 678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=678)) - There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility.… ([Location 684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=684)) - But then there always comes that moment of awakening, after several hours of slumber, still in the fastness of the night. The eyes open abruptly as if seized by the depth of the silence. Any shifting to ease your limbs, the rustle of your sleeping bag, assume enormous proportions. So what is it that woke you? The very sound of silence? In a chapter entitled ‘A Night Among the Pines’, Stevenson mentions this sudden-awakening phenomenon, placing it around two in the morning and seeing it as affecting, at the same moment, all living beings asleep outside. He views it as a minor cosmic… ([Location 689](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=689)) - What is called ‘silence’ in walking is, in the first place, the abolishment of chatter, of that permanent noise that blanks and fogs everything, invading the vast prairies of our consciousness like couch-grass. Chatter deafens: it turns… ([Location 696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=696)) - But above all, silence is the dissipation of our language. Everything, in this world of work, leisure, activity, reproduction and consumption of things, everything has its function, its place, its utility, and a specific word that corresponds to it. Likewise our grammar reproduces our sequencings of action, our laborious grasp of things, our fuss and bustle. Always doing, producing, forever busying ourselves. Our language is tailored to the conventions of fabricated things, predictable gestures, normalized behaviours, received attitudes. Artifices adapted to one another: language is caught in the everyday construction of the world, participates in it,… ([Location 699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=699)) - In the silence of a walk, when you end up losing the use of words because by then you are doing nothing but walk (and here one should beware of those expedition guides who recode, detail, inform, punctuate the walk with names and explanations – the relief, the types of rock, the slopes, the names of plants and their virtues – to give the impression that everything visible has a name, that there is a grammar for everything that can be felt), in that… ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=704)) - The only words remaining to the walker are barely mutterings, words he catches himself saying (‘Come on, come on, come on’, ‘That’s it, ‘Oh, all right’, ‘There it is, there it is’), words hung like garlands on the fleeting seconds, commonplace, words not to say anything but to… ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=709)) - In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and politeness, and so many sublime maxims, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a deceitful and frivolous exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=834)) - Frugality is not quite the same as austerity. What I mean is that austerity always includes the idea of resisting the temptation of excess: too much food, too much wealth, too many possessions, too much pleasure. Austerity pinpoints the slope from pleasure towards excess. So it is a question of holding back, cutting down on quantities, saying no. In austerity there is a good proportion of severity, a contempt or rather a fear of pleasure. Austerity is a refusal to let go, an interdiction on feeling too much for fear of being carried away. Frugality, in contrast, is the discovery that simplicity is fulfilling, the discovery of perfect enjoyment with little or nothing: water, a fruit, the breathing of the wind. ([Location 1018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1018)) - 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. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1041)) - 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. ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1056)) - ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’ ([Location 1065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1065)) - 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. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, ‘This is and no mistake.’ ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1066)) - 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. ([Location 1072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1072)) - 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. ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1089)) - Love of the morning is a measure of health. But consider: let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1093)) - peyote was born when the Sun god launched an arrow of light at the Stag god whose horns, falling to the ground, were transformed into the precious cactus. ([Location 1382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1382)) - Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there can be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it’s something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like gold threads in the world’s fabric. They ought to be seized. ([Location 1592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1592)) - 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. ([Location 1723](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1723)) - The secret of the promenade is that availability of the mind, so rare in our busy, polarized lives, imprisoned in our own stubbornness. ‘Availability’ is a rare synthesis of abandon and activity, deploying all the charm of the mind during a walk. The soul becomes as it were available to the world of appearances. It has nothing to explain to anyone, and no obligation to be coherent. And in that game without consequences, it may be that the world yields more of itself to the whimsical saunterer than to the serious and systematic observer. ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1823)) - Subversion is not a matter of opposing but of evading, deflecting, altering with exaggeration, accepting blandly and moving rapidly on. ([Location 1932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1932)) - In the crowd everyone is pressed, in two ways: in a hurry, and constantly obstructed. But the stroller doesn’t have to go anywhere in particular. So he can stop for any incident or display, scrutinize interesting faces, slow down for intersections. But resisting the speed of business politics, his slowness becomes the condition for a higher agility: that of the mind. ([Location 1941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1941)) - Yet this poetic creativity retains an ambiguous quality: it is, Benjamin said, a ‘fantasmagoria’. It bypasses the awfulness of the city to recapture its passing marvels, it explores the poetry of collisions, but without stopping to denounce the alienation of labour and the masses. The flâneur has better things to do: remythologize the city, invent new divinities, explore the poetic surface of the urban spectacle. ([Location 1959](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1959)) - The question that now arises is whether the spread of uniform brands (‘chains’ as we call them without irony, identical links, tightening around us) and the aggressive expansion of traffic haven’t made urban strolling more difficult, less delightful and surprising. ([Location 1965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=1965)) - ‘As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,’ Thoreau wrote. ([Location 2034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00FUZPQ86&location=2034))