WALKING, LOOKING AND THINKING

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche quotes a letter by Gustave Flaubert in which the incomparable author of Madame Bovary confesses that he “cannot think and write except when seated”. This sets the irascible German off on one. “There I have caught you, nihilist!” he snarls. “Only thoughts reached by walking have value” (maxim 34). “Nihilist” seems something of an overreaction to the preference for sitting still over walking about. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed “philosopher with a hammer”, sometimes uses his chosen instrument to crack a nut.

Nevertheless, while I sympathize with the Frenchman, I do agree with the German that walking is good for thinking. So when I can no longer bear my study and the discipline of sitting still, when thinking has become mere inking, I take to the road, imitating those many thinkers for whom peripatesis is a philosophical catalyst, and, in some cases, a necessary condition of thought. Robert Macfarlane (whose invitation in his The Old Ways to follow in his mind's foot-steps is irresistible) quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions: “I can meditate only when I am walking … when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs” (2012: 27). And the second most famously melancholy Dane, the philosopher-theologian and father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, echoes this, speculating “that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour” (ibid.).