Wanderlust: A History of Walking Read Online Free PDF Page B

cultural rather than a natural state. This Rousseauian reversal that insists that men and nature are better in their original condition is, among other things, an attack on cities, aristocrats, technology, sophistication, and sometimes theology, and it is still going on today (though curiously the French, who were his primary audience and whose revolution he contributed to, have in the long run been less responsive to these ideas than the British, the Germans, and the Americans). Rousseau developed these ideas further in his Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality (1754) and in his novels Julie (1761) and Emile (1762). Both novels portray, in various ways, a simpler, more rural life—though none of them acknowledge the hard manual labor of most rural people. His fictional characters lived, as he himself did at his happiest, in unostentatious ease, supported by invisible toilers. The inconsistencies in Rousseau’s work don’t matter, for it is less a cogent analysis than the expression of a new sensibility and its new enthusiasms. That Rousseau wrote with great elegance is one of those inconsistencies and one of the reasons he was so widely read.
    In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau portrays man in his natural condition “wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without war and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm them,” even while he admits that we cannot know what this condition was. The treatise offhandedly ignores Christian narratives of human origins and reaches toward a prescient comparative anthropology of social evolution instead (and though it reiterates Christianity’s theme of the fall from grace, it reverses the direction of this fall: it is no longer into nature but into culture). In this ideology, walking functions as an emblem of the simple man and as, when the walk is solitary and rural, a means of being in nature and outside society. The walker has the detachment of the traveler but travels unadorned and unaugmented, dependent on his or her own bodily strength rather than on conveniences that can be made and bought—horses, boats, carriages. Walking is, after all, an activity essentially unimproved since the dawn of time.
    In portraying himself so often as a pedestrian, Rousseau claimed kin to this ideal walker before history, and he did walk extensively throughout his life. His wandering life began when he returned to Geneva from a Sunday stroll in the country, only to find that he had come back too late: the gates of the city were shut. Impulsively, the fifteen-year-old Rousseau decided to abandon hisbirthplace, his apprenticeship, and eventually his religion; he turned from the gates and walked out of Switzerland. In Italy and France he found and left many jobs, patrons, and friends during a life that seemed aimless until the day he read the Mercure de France and found his vocation. Ever after, he seemed to be trying to recover the carefree wandering of his youth. He writes of one episode, “I do not remember ever having had in all my life a spell of time so completely free from care and anxiety as those seven or eight days spent on the road. . . . This memory has left me the strongest taste for everything associated with it, for mountains especially and for travelling on foot. I have never travelled so except in my prime, and it has always been a delight to me. . . . For a long while I searched Paris for any two men sharing my tastes, each willing to contribute fifty louis from his purse and a year of his time for a joint tour of Italy on foot, with no other attendant than a lad to come with us and carry a knapsack.”
    Rousseau never found serious candidates for this early version of a walking tour (and never explained why companions were necessary to its execution, unless they were to pay the bills). But he continued to walk at every opportunity.