Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.
Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.
Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it. (read more)
8 comments:
There are few gifts more appreciated by the thoughtful walker than a nice hip flask.
On my screen, there's an ad under this post for "Knee Pain Surgery".
Apparently, someone is reading what gets posted here.
Well, sure, post a Caspar David Friedrich painting and I'm drawn in entirely to the article.
Though, this one would have been entirely more appropriate.
I always like having walked.
I walk, but not as far as Brancusi. That man was a great sculptor. I wonder if the difference is only in mileage. I think not.
This is obviously an underhanded advertisement for Scott Walker.
I bet he can get indicted for this or something.
My previous 80+ year old landlord was a walker. Walk for peace kind of guy. A peacenik hippy before before hippies were born. Walk for peace with Russia. Walk for peace with Cuba. He was actually anti-government communist type. Worked for Forest Department or some such. One of the finest old fellows I knew. Treated me like gold, his wife did too. Walked miles and miles and miles every day right to the end.
His passing was fast. He died in a week. When I visited next door his limbs had curled up and stiffened in worse shape than mine at the time and he couldn't even step off to potty. And I thought, "damn, all that walking is no help at all at the end." But what's a guy to do? Keep walking until you are dead, that's what.
A Not So Sad Heart At The Supermarket
When I was young I would walk for miles
And look hungrily into every face I passed.
No more of that! Now I navigate the aisles
Stunned by little ones and the little at last.
Apologies to Randall Jarrell.
Colin Fletcher, bless him, was a great lover of walking, and very, very good at writing about it.
Not someone I'd expect a BBC writer to have read, or even heard of, I guess.
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