HMN 2025: Writers on Walking |

Source: Dover Publications

A writer is a walker. At least a significant number of them are walkers. Literary history, from ancient times to modern times, is replete with writers who ponder the benefits of walking, especially for imagination and creativity. Collectively, these authors suggest that moving the mind and body without a practical destination in mind sharpens attention and loosens the imagination. Their writing, always reflective and often dense with language and ideas, invites readers to engage with similar levels of attention and imagination. Walking can be an antidote to the racing thoughts and short attention spans caused by social media.

henry David Thoreau, walking (1862)

Thoreau may have started the tradition of American writers reflecting on walking. Certainly, many later writers return to his insights and his linguistic style. When originally published Atlantic Ocean In 1862, shortly after Thoreau’s death, walking It’s a thesis. For Thoreau, walking was necessary for human health, clear thinking, and imagination. The walking time he recommends is 4 hours. The direction he recommends is west. “You must walk like a camel. It is said that the camel is the only animal that ruminates when it walks.” His seriousness about the necessity of walking is matched by his exclusivity (or snobbery). “I have met only one or two people in my life who understood the art of walking, that is to say, a genius at SUNTERING.” For Thoreau, walking is key. You need to walk aimlessly, be prepared for adventure, and be open to the influences of your environment. This must be kept in mind. Writing or any form of creativity will likely follow.

shane O’Mara, In praise of walking: New scientific exploration (2019)

“Walking gets our minds moving in a way it doesn’t in other animals,” the brain researcher wrote. Shane O’Mara. His book is a survey of modern research on walking. His thesis is not much different from Thoreau’s: “Walking changes brain activity for the better” (although Thoreau, an advocate of walking in the woods, would disdain O’Mara’s city walking). Nonetheless, the real difference lies in the way O’Mara supports and expands on the argument. He investigates the evolution of bipedal locomotion, the physiology of walking, and cognition related to spatial awareness. However, this book is not simply a scientific book. It is also philosophical. O’Mara reflects on urban walking, its therapeutic benefits and the stimulation of creativity. He urges that walking should be essential to every human life. “Pound the pavement, feel the wind on your face, let the light of day and the streetlights of night dance on the snow, feel the rain on your face, feel the ground, hear the sounds under your feet. Walk comfortably, alone, and think. And think about it.

Sebald’s novel seems to anticipate the scientific claims of O’Hara and others. His narrator says in the first sentence: “August 1992.” “I set out to walk around County Suffolk to get rid of the emptiness that grips me every time I finish a long day of work.” How does his walk get rid of that emptiness? By leveraging your interest in your surroundings. He is obsessed with diesel trains. spawning of herring; atrocities associated with the colonization of the Congo; the skull of British physician, scientist, and philosopher Thomas Browne; His terrible hurricane experience. The novel gives us a form of what it is possible to walk with caution.

Often compared to Sebald’s novel, open city is a chronicle of the protagonist, doctor Julius, walking the streets of New York and Brussels. It is also a chronicle of interest, but in this case the readers are invited to gradually become aware of Julius’ misperceptions. He regularly misperceives the landscape and the people he meets within it. For example, you might fire a clerk at an Internet cafe only to discover that he is an intellectual who is meant to be your friend, or imagine that a group of young men are your compatriots when they turn out to be robbers. . As he walks, his surroundings become a flight of memories that we learn to distrust. After the robbery, he says: “As I lay there, time became matter in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent clumps, spilling out at the same time, spreading like blobs.” Because Julius is not a completely reliable perceiver, Cole engages the reader in a series of evaluations and judgments not very different from those of the protagonist. The novel’s layered ambiguities call for the kind of rambling approach to reading that 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 anything but leisurely. Thoreau did not approve of the violent tales she told. For Strayed, whose life has been a mess, hiking, which often seems dangerous or impossible, becomes a catharsis. Once the hike is over, she has no idea what profound impact it will have on her life as a writer. “I didn’t know everything then. I was sitting on a white bench the day after my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t need to know. That I had enough to believe what I believed,” she wrote. “One thing was true,” Thoreau seems certain.

Thich Nhat Hanh, How to walk (2015)

Despite the grandiose title, this is a gentle book. Han was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and an exquisite and sometimes mischievous writer. For him, walking is a kind of meditation and mindfulness practice. Mindfulness in this case is the same as the mental stimulation and keen observation described by other writers on walking. “Every step makes me happy,” he wrote. Then, through a series of short vignettes, he explains how walking stimulates his mind, with extensive observations on walking at the airport, body awareness, climbing stairs and “touching peace.” .”

Beneath my feet: Writers on WalkingEditor: Duncan Minshull (2018)

Source: Notting Hill Editions Ltd.

Duncan Minshull has collected short writings on walking by writers as diverse as Kierkegaard, John Muir, Petrarch, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. Although each person has their own opinion on the benefits of walking, they agree that these benefits are many. In Kierkegaard’s words, “I was absorbed in the best of my thoughts, and no thought was so burdensome that I could not escape from it.” In Sand’s, “My own ideal was lodged in a corner of my brain, and it needed complete freedom in a few days for it to blossom. I carried it out into the street, my feet on the frozen ground, my shoulders covered.” With your hands in your pockets, sometimes your stomach is a little empty, but your head is more filled with dreams, melodies, colors, shapes, lights and ghostly figures.