These books are made for walking

Walking as a sign of poverty

“The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. […] Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic,” writes Rebecca Solnit in “Wanderlust. A History of Walking”. Her comprehensive cultural-historical treatise, which was published in 2000, was translated into German for the first time in 2019. In it, the journalist covers a wide range of material, starting with theories on the emergence of the upright gait and spanning medieval pilgrimages and the walks through nature taken by Romantic poets, as well as contemporary mass demonstrations.

What becomes clear here is that although our early human ancestors began walking on two feet several million years ago, for many centuries walking itself was considered a sign of poverty: Any self-respecting person with the means to do so would use a carriage to get from A to B. It was only in the late 18th century, during the age of Romanticism, that intellectuals began walking solely for pleasure and to consciously spend time in nature, a seminal change that Solnit illustrates using the example of the poet William Wordsworth. With the rapid growth of cities during industrialization, during the late 19th century there also emerged the concept of the flaneur: With a hat and cane and with no fixed destination, he would stroll along the streets and even became the foundation for his own literary genre – Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, or Franz Hessel come to mind as examples here. It is a list that, with the few exceptions of figures like George Sand and Virginia Woolf, is composed entirely of men. Why were so few women out and about, Solnit asks.

“Reading in the text of the city”

Another publication, not exclusively related to the role of women but likewise exploring the meaning of walking within urban spaces, is “Psychogeographie” by Anneke Lubkowitz, which revolves around “the image of walking as reading in the text of the city”. This is also an anthology with a mixture of theoretical and poetic texts, including examples from literary walkers Will Self and David Wagner, who indulge in observations and associations on their rambles, or from the professor of “Walking Studies”, Lucius Burckhardt, who worked with students to stage actionist interventions drawing attention to the amount of space cars actually take up in the public space.

Of course, it wouldn’t be complete without the expertise of Guy Debord, the founder of the “Situationist International” which emerged in Paris in the 1950s. It was he who coined the titular term “psychogeography”, behind which lies the question of what influence the architecture of a city has on our emotional behavior when we move through it along familiar and unfamiliar paths. Debord urges people to playfully detach themselves from routine, everyday actions by “wandering around” and to abandon themselves to encounters in the terrain.

Wild and poetic

Tomas Espedal takes this transcendental self-awareness one step further. His book, “Tramp, or, the Art of Living a Wild and Poetic Life”, categorized as a novel, describes a man who one day leaves his wife, child, and home to head out into the great beyond – and in doing so, to find himself. This first-person narrator wanders the world in keeping with the classic image of the “lonesome traveler”, who drinks himself into oblivion in bars, sleeps outdoors, and carries only the bare necessities.

But along with alcohol, walking also gives him a rush that quickly becomes addictive: “There is a point, a stage, at which walking has noticeably crossed a boundary; I no longer feel like stopping, I just want to keep going, going, going, it no longer matters where and why, in which direction, walking has become second nature to me, it is a rush, a freedom rush [...].”The “runners’ high” that enables long-distance runners to forget all the efforts and never stop seems to be able to take effect even at a walking pace. But you must beware, the narrator cautions: “you might go so far that it could be difficult to go back to what is normal, to what used to be, a job, a home?”

Solnit, Kagge, and Espedal all approach walking from different angles; they detach it from the notion of banal forward motion and consider it from a cultural-historical, philosophical, and scientific point of view. Anyone who engages with their texts will likewise find themselves walking – even while they sit at home on the sofa.