Writers are walkers—at least a significant number of them are. Literary history from the ancients to the contemporary is crowded with writers reflecting on the benefits of walking—especially when it comes to the imagination and creativity. Walking, like writing, involves a subtle interplay of conscious intent and non-conscious cognition, or intuition and intention.
Collectively, these writers suggest that the mind and body in motion, with no practical destination in mind, sharpens attention and loosens imagination. Their writing, always reflective and often dense with language and ideas, invites readers to engage with similar degrees of attention and imagination. Walking may be the antidote to the rushed thinking and short attention spans rewarded by social media.
Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)
Thoreau may have originated the American tradition of writers reflecting on walking. Certainly, many later writers return to his insights—and his way with language. Originally published in The Atlantic in 1862, just after Thoreau’s death, Walking is a treatise. For Thoreau, walking was necessary for human health, clear thinking, and imagination. His recommended walking time: Four hours. His recommended direction: West. “You must walk like a camel,” he writes, “which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” His seriousness about the necessity of walking is matched by his exclusivity (or snobbery): “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING.” Sauntering, for Thoreau, is key. One must walk without destination, be ready for adventure, and open the mind to the influence of the environment. One must be mindful. The writing—or any form of creativity—will follow.
Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration (2019)
“Walking makes our minds mobile in a fashion denied other animals,” writes the brain researcher Shane O’Mara. His book is a survey of contemporary research on walking. His thesis is not so different from Thoreau’s: “walking measurably changes brain activity for the better” (though Thoreau, proponent of walking in the woods, would disdain O’Mara’s urban walking). Nonetheless, the real difference lies in how O’Mara supports and expands on the claim. He surveys the evolution of bi-pedalism, the physiology of walking, and the cognition involved with spatial awareness. But the book isn’t simply scientific. It’s also philosophical. O’Mara reflects on city walking, therapeutic effects of walking, and the stimulation of creativity. Walking, he urges, should be integral to every human’s life: “Pound the pavements; get the wind in your face; let the light of day and street lamps of night dance on your eyes; feel the rain on your face; sense the ground beneath your feet; hear the sounds; talk—if only to yourself; relax into walking and let your mind wander, deliberate, contemplate…” The science he surveys reinforces the the idea writers return to: Walking and writing both involve a dynamic relationship between conscious and nonconscious experience.
Sebald’s novel seems to anticipate the scientific claims made by O’Hara and others. “In the august of 1992,” his narrator tells us in the opening sentence, “I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” How does his walk dispel that emptiness? By harnessing his attention to his surroundings. He is engrossed by diesel trains; the spawning of herring; the atrocities involved in colonizing the Congo; the skull of English doctor, scientist, and philosopher Thomas Browne; his experience of a disastrous hurricane. The novel is a demonstration of the forms of attention walking makes possible.
Often compared Sebald’s novel, Open City is a chronicle of its protagonist—a physician named Julius—walking the streets of New York and Brussels. It’s also a chronicle of attention, but in this case readers are gradually invited to notice Julius’ misperceptions. He regularly misperceives landscapes and the people he encounters within them—for example, dismissing a clerk at an Internet café only to learn he is an intellectual who will become a friend or imagining a group of young men are compatriots when they turn out to be muggers. During his walks, his surroundings become vehicles for flights of memory we learn to mistrust. After the mugging, he tells us: “As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading like something spilled, like a stain.” Because Julius is not an entirely trustworthy perceiver, Cole involves readers in a set of appraisals and judgments not so different from his protagonist’s. The layered ambiguity of the novel requires the kind of sauntering approach to reading Thoreau would admire.
Cheryl Strayed, Wild(2012)
Strayed’s 1,100 mile hike from the Mojave desert, through California and Oregon to Washington State, is no saunter. Thoreau would not approve of the strenuous tale she tells. For Strayed, whose life was in shambles, the hike—often dangerous or seemingly impossible—becomes catharsis. At hike’s end, she can’t know the profound effects it will have on her life as a writer. “It was all unknown to me then,” she writes, “as I sat on the white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust what I had done was true.” It seems likely that Thoreau would be convinced.
Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk (2015)
Despite its bossy title, this is a gentle book. Hahn was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk—and an exquisite and sometimes mischievous writer. For him, walking is a form of meditation, a mindfulness practice. In this case, mindfulness is equivalent to the mental stimulation and acute observation other writers on walking describe. “Every step makes me happy,” he writes. Then, through a series of short vignettes, he goes on to describe just how his mind is stimulated by walking, along with his wide-ranging observations on walking in airports, becoming aware of his physical body, climbing a staircase, and “touching peace.”
Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking, Edited by Duncan Minshull (2018)
Duncan Minshull has collected short pieces of writing on walking by writers as varied as Kierkegaard, John Muir, Petrarch, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka. While each has a unique take on the benefits of walking, they agree that these benefits are plenty. In Kierkegaard’s words, “I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” In Sand’s, “My own ideal was lodged in a corner of my brain, and I needed only a few days of complete freedom to have it blossom. I carried it with me into the street, my feet on the icy patches, my shoulders covered, hands in my pockets, my stomach a little empty sometimes, but my head all the more filled with with dreams, melodies, colours, shapes, lights, and phantom figures.”