Wanderlust

Few of the canonical essayists can resist telling us that we should walk because it is good for us, nor from providing directions on how to walk. In 1913 the historian G. M. Trevelyan begins his “Walking” with “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters th

At such times it is as though the still small pool of one’s own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge. These moments when individual

Hazlitt declares that solitude is better on a walk because “you cannot read the book of nature, without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others” and because “I want to see my vague notions float like the down of the thistle and not to have them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy.” Much of his

The Life writers may be right. Bodies are not obsolete by any objective standard, but they increasingly are perceived as too slow, frail, and unreliable for our expectations and desires—as parcels to be transported by mechanical means (though of course many steep, rough, or narrow spaces can only be traversed on foot, and many remote parts of the w

By the late nineteenth century the word tramp as both noun and verb was popular among the walking writers, as was vagabond and gypsy and, far down the road in a different world, nomad, but to play at tramp or gypsy is one way of demonstrating that you are not really one. You must be complex to want simplicity, settled to desire this kind of mobilit

The great German artist Joseph Beuys used to recite, as a maxim and manifesto, the phrase “Everyone an artist.” I used to think it meant that he thought everyone should make art, but now I wonder if he wasn’t speaking to a more basic possibility: that everyone could become a participant rather than a member of the audience, that everyone could beco

“Anyone who has tried to take a stroll at dusk through a neighborhood patrolled by armed security guards and signposted with death threats quickly realizes how merely notional, if not utterly obsolete, is the old idea of ‘freedom of the city,’ ” writes Mike Davis of the nicer suburbs of Los Angeles. And Kierkegaard long ago exclaimed, “It is extrem

The body described again and again in postmodern theory does not suffer under the elements, encounter other species, experience primal fear or much in the way of exhilaration, or strain its muscles to the utmost. In sum, it doesn’t engage in physical endeavor or spend time out of doors. The very term “the body” so often used by postmodernists seems

Whether or not the Sophists were virtuous, they were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale, for the loyalty that ties down the latter will often drive the former from place to place.