A Philosophy of Walking (2 page)

When walking in this mode we discover the immense vigour of starry night skies, elemental energies, and our appetites follow: they are enormous, and our bodies are satisfied. When you have slammed the world's door, there is nothing left to hold you: pavements no longer guide your steps (the path, a hundred thousand times repeated, of the return to the fold). Crossroads shimmer like hesitant stars, you rediscover the tremulous fear of choosing, a vertiginous freedom.

This time, there's no question of freeing yourself from artifice to taste simple joys. Instead there is the promise of meeting a freedom head-on as an outer limit of the self and of the human, an internal overflowing of a rebellious Nature that goes beyond you. Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us.

What I mean is that by walking you are not going to meet yourself. By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it's all very well for
psychologists' consulting rooms. But isn't being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.

So we are a moving two-legged beast, just a pure force among big trees, just a cry. For often, while walking, we shout to assert our recovered animal presence. No doubt, in the great liberation exalted by the beat generation of Ginsberg and Burroughs, in that debauch of energy that was meant to tear up our lives and blow sky-high the dens of the submissive, walking in the mountains was just one means among others: others that included the drugs, the booze and the orgies through which we hoped to attain innocence.

But a dream can be glimpsed in that freedom: walking to express rejection of a rotten, polluted, alienating, shabby civilization. As Kerouac writes in
The Dharma Bums
:

The walker's last freedom is more uncommon. It is a third stage, after the rediscovery of simple joys and the reconquest of the primitive animal: the freedom of
renunciation
. Heinrich Zimmer, one of the great writers on Indian civilizations, tells us that Hindu philosophy distinguishes four stages on the journey through life. The first is that of the pupil, the student, the disciple. Thus in the morning of life, the essential tasks are to obey the master's injunctions, absorb his lessons, submit to criticism and conform to the principles laid down. It is a time for receiving and accepting. In the second stage the man, now adult, in the midday of his life, becomes the master of a house, married, responsible for a family: he manages his property as well as he can, contributes to the upkeep of the priests, exercises a trade or skill, submits to social constraints and imposes them on others. He agrees to wear the social masks that define a role for him in society and in the family.

Later, in the afternoon of his life, when the children are ready to take over, the man can abandon all social duties, family expenses and economic concerns, to become a hermit. This is the stage of ‘withdrawal to the forest', in which through contemplation and meditation he familiarizes himself with what has always lain unchanged within us, waiting for us to awaken it: the eternal Self, transcending masks, functions, identities, histories.

And the pilgrim eventually succeeds the hermit, in what should be the endless, glorious summer evening of our lives: a life henceforth dedicated to travel in which endless walking, in one direction and another, illustrates the harmonization of the nameless Self with the omnipresent heart of the World. The sage has now renounced everything and attained the highest level of freedom: that of perfect detachment. He is no longer involved, either in himself or in the world. Indifferent to past and future alike, he is nothing other than the eternal present of coexistence. And as we know from the pilgrimage diaries of Swami Ramdas, it is when we renounce everything that everything is given to us, in abundance. Everything: meaning the intensity of presence itself.

During long cross-country wanders, you do glimpse that freedom of pure renunciation. When you walk for a long time, there comes a moment when you no longer know how many hours have passed, or how many more will be needed to get there; you feel on your shoulders the weight of the bare necessities, you tell yourself that's quite enough – that really nothing more is needed to keep body and soul together – and you feel you could carry on like this for days, for centuries. You can hardly remember where you are going or why; that is as meaningless as your history, or what the time is. And you feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems absolutely derisory, minuscule, insubstantial.

Why I Am Such a Good Walker – Nietzsche
 

R
uptures, Nietzsche wrote, are difficult, because of the suffering caused by the removal of a bond. But in its place, we soon receive a boost. Nietzsche's life was to be made up of these detachments, these breaks, these isolations: from the world, society, travelling companions, colleagues, wives, friends, relations. But every deepening of his solitude signified a further extension of his freedom: no
explanations to give, no compromises to stand in his way, his vision clear and detached.

Nietzsche was a remarkable walker, tireless. He mentioned it all the time. Walking out of doors was as it were the
natural element
of his oeuvre, the invariable accompaniment to his writing.

His life can be divided into four main acts, the first covering his formative years, from his birth in 1844 to his appointment as professor of philology at the University of Basle. His father was a pastor, a good and upright man who died young, when Friedrich was four years old. The young Nietzsche liked to imagine himself the last scion of a noble Polish lineage (the Nietzskis).

After his father's death he became the pampered darling of his mother, grandmother and sister, the object of intense solicitude. Highly intelligent, the boy received a classical education at the renowned (and tough) Pforta secondary school. There he was subjected to an iron regime whose efficacy he was to recognize later in life, based on the Greek equation: you must know how to obey in order to know how to command. His loving and admiring mother hoped that he would use his brilliant intellect in God's service, seeing him as a theologian. He was a vigorous boy with excellent health, afflicted only by severe short-sightedness, doubtless very badly corrected.

A brilliant academic career in philology followed at the University of Bonn, then at Leipzig. At the precocious age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of philology at the University of Basle, on the recommendation of the
philologist and librarian Friedrich Ritschi. The second act opened.

For ten years he taught Greek philology, ten years of struggle and difficulty. The workload was enormous: in addition to his lectures at the university, he was required to lecture at the town's main secondary school (the Pedagogium). But Nietzsche's interests extended beyond philology alone. Attracted by music at an early age, he was later fascinated by philosophy; but it was the science of philology that had welcomed him. And he embraced it in return, slightly unhappily, for it was not his true vocation. It did enable him at least to read the Greek authors: tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles), poets (Homer, Hesiod), philosophers (Heraclitus, Anaximander) and historians (especially Diogenes Laertius, because, he said, his writings portrayed men, over and above systems). The first year went very well: he worked with fervour on his lectures, enjoyed success among the students, found new colleagues – one of whom, Franz Overbeck, professor of theology, became his dear and faithful friend. The friend through thick and thin, the one who is called on to help; the one who went to look for him in Turin after the catastrophe.

It was in 1869 that Nietzsche made a trip to Lucerne, going on to Tribschen where he made his emotional visit to the ‘Master' (Wagner) in the latter's immense, monumental house. There he was much taken with Cosima (whom he would call, in the letters he wrote after going mad, his ‘Princess Ariane, my beloved – a prejudice makes
me a man, but it is true that I have long frequented them' – January 1889).

The enthusiasm, academic ardour and bounding health did not last long, however. Fainting fits and seizures started to occur. The body was avenging a series of bad mistakes.

Professional trouble began with the appearance in 1871 of
The Birth of Tragedy
, which rendered professional philologists speechless, often with rage. Could he really have meant to write such a work? Less the outcome of serious research than of vague, metaphysical intuitions: the eternal conflict between chaos and form. He was troubled in his friendships, too. He went regularly to Bayreuth to attend the Master's annual consecration, returned to Tribschen, became a travelling companion in Europe, but came more and more to understand that Wagner's fanatical dogmatism and arrogance represented all that he most execrated, and that above all the music made him ill.

Wagner's music, he was to write, drowns you, it's a marasmus, you have to ‘swim' continuously in it, it submerges you in a throbbing, chaotic wave. You lose your footing when you listen to it. Rossini on the other hand makes you want to dance. Not to mention Bizet's
Carmen
. Misfortune in love plagued him too: refusal after refusal answered his – somewhat abrupt – proposals of marriage. And lastly, social failure, for he did not manage to take root either in the worldly clamour of Bayreuth or in academic and intellectual circles.

Everything became more difficult. Every term was harder, more impossible. Increasingly he was seized by terrible
headaches that kept him in bed, lying in the dark, gasping with agony. His eyes hurt, he could hardly read or write. Each quarter-hour of reading or writing cost him hours of migraine. He asked to be read to, for his eyes wavered on contact with the page.

Nietzsche tried to compromise, asking to be discharged from one course, and soon after even from his teaching obligations at the secondary school. He obtained a year off to breathe, recover, gather his strength. But nothing worked.

Nevertheless, what he meant at the time to be a restorative carried the mark of his future destiny: long walks and great solitude, two remedies against throbbing, terrible pain. Flight from the arousal, the demands, the agitations of the world, always paid for in hours of suffering. And walking, walking for hours at a time to disperse, divert, forget the hammering in his temples. He had not yet become fascinated by the hard minerality of high mountains or the scented aridity of the South's rocky paths. He walked mainly beside lakes (Lake Léman, with Carl von Gersdorff, six hours a day), or plunged into the shade of forests (pine forests, at Steinabad near the southern end of the Black Forest: ‘I am walking a lot, through the forest, and having tremendous conversations with myself').

By August 1877 he was at Rosenlaui, living as a hermit: ‘If only I could have a little house somewhere like this; I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would later jot down on paper.'

But nothing really helped. The pain was too fierce. Migraine attacks kept him in bed for days at a time, painful
vomiting kept him awake all night. His eyes hurt, and his sight started to fade. In May 1879 he submitted his resignation to the university.