Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden Read Free Book Online Page B

soul. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Or, at any rate, I couldn’t put it into words.
    I felt that it had something to do with the space, with the openness of the fields and the sky. And I felt that it had something to do with the gentle, almost imperceptible, pace at which things change.
    Out in the countryside, you’re part of something bigger, more important, and longer lasting than yourself. So that you get dwarfed by it all. But in a good way.
    The British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch expressed it far better than I ever could in her beautiful book The Sovereignty of Good :
     
    I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then I suddenly observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.

    Perhaps all of this explains why so many troubled and depressive thinkers have been avid walkers.
    Take the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for example, a man so messed up and brooding and despondent that I consider myself positively cheerful by comparison.
    By the age of twenty-one, he had lost his mother and five of his six siblings. He had a religiously melancholic father who viewed these deaths as God’s punishment for the sins of his youth. He suffered physical problems, including a curved spine and – quite possibly – sexual impotence.
    As a young man, he broke off his engagement to a young woman whom he adored, on the grounds that he could never offer her anything like a normal marriage, and then spent the rest of his life mourning for her loss.
    As a child he was ridiculed and bullied by his schoolmates, and as an adult he was ridiculed in the Danish press. To cap all of this, he suffered – perhaps unsurprisingly – from severe and chronic anxiety.
    He wrote in his journal: ‘The whole of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation. . . . Great is my distress, unlimited.’
    At another time he wrote:
     
    I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away – yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ––––––––––– and wanted to shoot myself.
     
    This is hard-core depression. Yet even a man afflicted with this level of despair was able to draw comfort and consolation from the simple act of walking.
    In 1847, in a letter to his niece Henrietta, he wrote:
     
    Above all, do not lose your desire to walk; every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
     
    Or, for another example, take the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
    In his old age, at the close of a brilliant, but also a turbulent and unhappy life, he took to walking alone in the countryside around Paris.
    A sufferer from poor mental health, Rousseau considered himself to have been the victim of jealousy and persecution throughout his life, and had determined to end his days in withdrawal from the society that he felt had so cruelly mistreated him.
    In his final work, Reveries of a Solitary Walker , which was unfinished at his death, he describes his walks and the ‘flights of thought’ that accompanied them. It is a beautiful and lyrical book: sometimes intensely sad and sometimes wonderfully uplifting; sometimes sharply insightful and sometimes narcissistic and paranoid. To me, it paints a picture of a troubled and suspicious man, who, in his solitary walks, finds a measure of tranquillity and contentment that he could find nowhere else.
    He writes: