Some walking quotes from the beginning of wanderlust: a history of walking:
Isn’t it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking . . . questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.—HONORÉ DE BALZAC, THEORIE DE LA DEMARCHÉ
An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.—LUCY LIPPARD, OVERLAY
We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of place must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.—GARY SNYDER, “BLUE MOUNTAINS CONSTANTLY WALKING”
Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary rush.—VIRGINIA WOOLF, MOMENTS OF BEING
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, “OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS”
As a result of walking tours in Scotland while he was an undergraduate, he recalls in his autobiography, Pilgrim’s Way (1940), that “the works of Aristotle are forever bound up with me with the smell of peat and certain stretches of granite and heather.”—ON JOHN BUCHAN, FIRST BARON TWEEDSMUIR, INCHALLENGE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE LITERATURE OF MOUNTAINEERING
. . . while he himself began to walk around at a lively pace in a “Keplerian ellipse,” all the time explaining in a low voice his thoughts on “complementarity.” He walked with bent head and knit brows: from time to time, he looked up at me and underlined some important point by a sober gesture. As he spoke, the words and sentences which I had read before in his papers suddenly took life and became loaded with meaning. It was one of the few solemn moments that count in an existence, the revelation of a world of dazzling thought.—LEON ROSENFELD, ON A 1929 ENCOUNTER WITH NIELS BOHR
Last Sunday I took a Walk toward highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr. Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s in conversation with Coleridge—I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable—I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for nearly two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, poetry—on Poetical Sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A Ghost story—. . . .—JOHN KEATS, IN A LETTER TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS
Sir, I have received your new book written against the human race, and I thank you. . . . Never was so much intelligence used to make us stupid. While reading it, one longs to go on all fours.—VOLTAIRE TO ROUSSEAU, ON THE DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY
The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provided feelings of shame in him.—FREUD, CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by helding holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.—SAMUEL BECKETT
John and the Austrian walked one way along the shore discussing the formation of sand banks and the theories of the tides, and Charlotte & I went in the opposite direction for above two hours and lastly lay down among the long grass and gathered shells until our Handkerchiefs were quite full.—EFFIE GRAY RUSKIN
You’ve got to walk / that lonesome valley / Walk it yourself / You’ve gotta gotta go / By yourself / Ain’t nobody else / gonna go there for you / Yea, you’ve gotta go there by yourself.—TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG
But if a man walketh in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.—JOHN 11:10
But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem me, and be merciful unto me. My foot standeth in an even place.—PSALMS 26:1–12
The farther pilgrims move from their common world, the closer they come to the realm of the divine. We might mention that in Japanese the word for “walk” is the same word which is used to refer to Buddhist practice; the practitioner (gyōja) is then also the walker, one who does not reside anywhere, who abides in emptiness. All of this is of course related to the notion of Buddhism as a path: practice is a concrete approach to Buddhahood.—ALLAN G. GRAPARD, “FLYING MOUNTAINS AND WALKERS OF EMPTINESS: TOWARD A DEFINITION OF SACRED SPACE IN JAPANESE RELIGIONS”
At the same time continue to count inhalations and exhalations as you walk slowly around the room. Begin walking with the left foot and walk in such a way that the foot sinks into the floor, first the heel and then the toes. Walk calmly and steadily, with poise and dignity. The walking must not be done absentmindedly, and the mind must be taut as you concentrate on the counting.—INSTRUCTIONS ON WALKING MEDITATION IN THREE PILLARS OF ZEN
Sigmund Freud believed, for example, that the psychical foundation of all travel was the first separation and the various other departures from one’s mother, including the final journey into death. Journeying is therefore an activity related to a larger feminine realm, so that it is not surprising that Freud himself was ambivalent about it. Of the landscape he said, “All of these dark woods, narrow defiles, high grounds and deep penetrations are unconscious sexual imagery, and we are exploring a woman’s body.”—PAUL SHEPARD, NATURE AND MADNESS
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.—THOMAS MERTON
I was the first in six generations to leave the Valley, the only one in my family to ever leave home. But I didn’t leave all the parts of me: I kept the ground of my own being. On it I walked away, taking with me the land, the Valley, Texas.—GLORIA ANZALDUA
An active line on a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.—PAUL KLEE, ALLEGORIZING DRAWING
Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves (stumbling against words as against cobblestones)—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “LE SOLEIL”
At the other extreme is a group of figurative monuments in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, which try to draw the viewer back into the tumult of the past. Several works designed by James Drake along a path named Freedom Walk commemorate the brutal police repression of the famous marches in the spring of 1963. In one work, the walkway passes between two vertical slabs, from which bronze attack dogs emerge on either side and lunge into the pedestrian’s space. In another the walkway leads through an opening in a metal wall faced by two water cannons; just off the wall, by the walk, are two bronze figures of African Americans, a man crumpled to the ground and a woman standing with her back against the imagined force of the water. Integrated into the pedestrian experience of the park, these monuments invite everyone—black or white, young or old—to step for a moment into someone else’s shoes.—KIRK SAVAGE
I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes, / with fury, with forgetfulness—PABLO NERUDA
Yeah, I'm not too worried about the foot, it was the increment, too much too soon. The muscles in the foot are smaller, so they just need some more time to come back. I'm also fat. so. The next walk should be this Sunday depends on how the foot is.
