Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker
THE TITLE SAYS everything of this posthumous book. Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire is the last thing Rousseau wrote; he worked on it until a few weeks before he died, in 1778. The word "walk" is a specific activity in the book, but it also implies an essay, the word Montaigne used to mean a try, or an attempt.
"I am now alone on earth," Rousseau writes in the first line of the "First Walk," and announces that this sequence of walks will take the form of self-examination. Detached from everything and everyone for fifteen years (because of exile, condemnation, and harassment), utterly alone, he asks, "What am I?"
His serene condition, which he calls renunciation, is like that of the mendicant saddhu who wanders in India. "Everything is finished for me on earth. People can no longer do good or evil to me here. I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but unperturbed, like God himself."
Through walking, Rousseau remembers events, interprets his actions, and recalls embarrassments — a key one in the "Fourth Walk" when, asked about his children, he claims he doesn't have any. It is, as he writes, a lie. Rousseau had five children, who, for their own good (so he claimed in his Confessions and here too), he stuck in a foundling home. But this memory provokes a reverie about being untruthful.
His meditation on happiness in the "Fifth Walk" produces one of the many bittersweet reflections on the transitory nature of joy: "Happiness [is] a fleeting state which leaves our heart still worried and empty."
In later walks he speaks of how a country ramble can be spoiled or overpowered by certain conditions, how "memory of the company I had left followed me into solitude," and how particular itineraries had put him into contact with people he found upsetting. A tone of resignation permeates the Reveries. Rousseau was through trying to persuade anyone that he was worthy. Intensely autobiographical, it is a set of excursions that become reflections on life and death, for a man who is about to die.
Wordsworth: A Nature Poet with "Serviceable Legs"
WORDSWORTH'S PASSION FOR walking inspired his poems, which often praise the joyful activity of walking. At the age of seventy-three, reflecting on one of his earliest poems, "An Evening Walk," he wrote that he was an "eye-witness" to the features of the countryside that he put into the poem. Speaking of a particular couplet, he wrote, "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the deficiency."
His life was shaped by walking. Walking home after a party, while in his teens, overcome by a sunrise and a glimpse of mountains, he felt he was witnessing a revelation, and was so moved he decided that his role in life would be a "Dedicated Spirit."
Walking became part of his routine, living with his sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Dorothy remarked on how he walked for hours, even in the rain, and that "he generally composes his verses out of doors."
"He was, upon the whole, not a well-made man. His legs were pointedly condemned by all female connoisseurs in legs," Thomas De Quincey wrote waspishly, yet his legs were "serviceable," adding, "I calculate, upon good data, that with those identical legs Wordsworth must have traveled a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles."
Wordsworth ambled around Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In his fifties he toured the Continent, walking up and down France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere, writing the whole time. Even in his sixties he was able to walk twenty miles a day. Dorothy wrote, "And as to climbing of mountains, the hardiest & the youngest are yet hardly a match for him." At seventy he climbed Helvellyn, at over three thousand feet the third-highest peak in the Lake District.
He died at the age of eighty, a few weeks after being taken ill on a walk. One of the oddities of Wordsworth as a lover of flowers and fresh air is that (so everyone who knew him testified) he had no sense of smell.
Thoreau's "Walking
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, who made a sacrament of walking, was a relentless analyzer of his experience and a constant refiner of his prose style, as his voluminous journals attest. And Thoreau was never happier than when he was robustly explaining the crochets of his life. His essay "Walking," which appeared in his posthumous volume Excursions, is one of his happiest pieces. It is also one of the best essays on the subject of perambulation. Thoreau lived near enough to nature in Concord that he did not have to go far to feel he was surrounded by wilderness, even when he could hear train whistles.
He is specific about miles — he walked as much as twenty a day, he says — and about hours too: "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements."
This sacramental walking must not be confused with mere physical exercise, he says, but is more akin to yoga or a spiritual activity. "The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours, as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!" Since walking cannot be separated from the process of thought, "you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.'"
In "Walking" Thoreau writes, "Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey." This is a classic Thoreau conceit, the isolated farmhouse every bit as satisfying as distant Dahomey. In fact, Thoreau was a wide reader of travel books, and though Sir Richard Burton's Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey came out the year after Thoreau died, he was familiar with Burton's travels in the lake regions of central Africa and elsewhere — twelve of Burton's books of travel and discovery were published in Thoreau's lifetime, including Wanderings in West Africa.
He invokes Burton in this essay, saying, "Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it, 'Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded… In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.'"
But Thoreau, who avoided traveling on ocean, in desert, or through wilderness, belittled foreign travel, persuasively insisting it was not necessary to the serious walker. It is this persuasiveness — the triumph of his prose style — that made him far more influential than men and women who lived heroic lives of travel. Never mind counting the cats in Zanzibar, Thoreau says: "There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you."