Wanderlust: A History of Walking Read Online Free PDF

the Philosopher’s Way Kierkegaard mentions in Copenhagen.
    And philosophers who walked—well, walking is a universal human activity. Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and many others walked far, and Thomas Hobbes even had a walking stick with an inkhorn built into it so he could jot down ideas as he went. Frail Immanuel Kant took a daily walk around Königsberg after dinner—but it was merely for exercise, because he did his thinking sitting by the stove and staring at the church tower out the window. The young Friedrich Nietzsche declares with superb conventionality, “For recreation I turn to three things, and a wonderful recreation they provide!—my Schopenhauer, Schumann’s music, and, finally, solitary walks.” In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell recounts of his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein, “He used to come to my rooms at midnight, and for hours he would walk backwards and forwards like a caged tiger. On arrival, he would announce that when he left my rooms he would commit suicide. So, in spite of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out. One such evening after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, ‘Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?’ ‘Both’ he said, and then reverted to silence.” Philosophers walked. But philosophers who thought about walking are rarer.
II. C ONSECRATING W ALKING
    It is Rousseau who laid the groundwork for the ideological edifice within which walking itself would be enshrined—not the walking that took Wittgenstein back and forth in Russell’s room, but the walking that took Nietzsche out into the landscape. In 1749 the writer and encylopedist Denis Diderot was thrown into jail for writing an essay questioning the goodness of God. Rousseau, a close friend of Diderot’s at the time, took to visiting him in jail, walking the six miles from his home in Paris to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Though that summer was extremely hot, says Rousseau in his not entirely reliable Confessions (1781–88), he walked because he was too poor to travel by other means. “In order to slacken my pace,” writes Rousseau, “I thought of taking a book with me. One day I took the Mercure de France and, glancing through it as I walked, I came upon this question propounded by the Dijon Academy for the next year’s prize: Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them? The moment I read that I beheld another universe and became another man.” In this other universe, this other man won the prize, and the published essay became famous for its furious condemnation of such progress.
    Rousseau was less an original thinker than a daring one; he gave the boldest articulation to existing tensions and the most fervent praise to emerging sensibilities. The assertion that God, monarchical government, and nature were all harmoniously aligned was becoming untenable. Rousseau, with his lower-middle-class resentments, his Calvinist Swiss suspicion of kings and Catholicism, his desire to shock, and his unshakable self-confidence, was the person to make specific and political those distant rumblings of discord. In the Discourse on the Arts and Letters, he declared that learning and even printing corrupt and weaken both the individual and the culture. “Behold how luxury, licentiousness, and slavery have in all periods been punishment for the arrogant attempts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which eternal wisdom had placed us.” The arts and sciences, he asserted, lead not to happiness nor to self-knowledge, but to distraction and corruption.
    Now the assumption that the natural, the good, and the simple are all aligned seems commonplace at best; then, it was incendiary. In Christian theology, nature and humanity had both fallen from grace after Eden; it was Christiancivilization that redeemed them, so that goodness was a