Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online

disembodied magical realm of the imagination that had only one real inhabitant, himself. Even the myriad pseudonyms under which he published many of his best-known works seem devices to lose himself while revealing himself and to make a crowd out of his solitude.Throughout his adult life, Kierkegaard almost never received guests at home, and indeed, throughout his life he almost never had anyone he could call a friend, though he had a vast acquaintance. One of his nieces says that the streets of Copenhagen were his “reception room,” and Kierkegaard’s great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters, acquaintances’ greetings, and overheard conversations. A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting. Walking provided Kierkegaard, like Rousseau, with a wealth of casual contacts with his fellow humans, and it facilitated contemplation.
    In 1837, just as his literary work was beginning, Kierkegaard wrote, “Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object; without this environment it bleeds to death in the exhausting embrace of an indefinite idea.” He found the same tumult on the street. More than a decade later, he declared in another journal, “In order to bear mental tension such as mine, I need diversion, the diversion of chance contacts on the streets and alleys, because association with a few exclusive individuals is actually no diversion.” In these and other statements, he proposes that the mind works best when surrounded by distraction, that it focuses in the act of withdrawing from surrounding bustle rather than in being isolated from it. He reveled in the turbulent variety of city life, saying elsewhere, “This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing—it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant.”
    In his journals, he insists that he composed all his works afoot. “Most of Either/Or was written only twice (besides, of course, what I thought through while walking, but that is always the case); nowadays I like to write three times,” says one passage, and there are many like it protesting that although his extensive walks were perceived as signs of idleness they were in fact the foundation of his prolific work. The recollections of others show him during his pedestrian encounters, but there must have been long solitary intervals in which he could compose his thoughts and rehearse the day’s writing. Perhaps it was that the citystrolls distracted him so that he could forget himself enough to think more productively, for his private thoughts are often convolutions of self-consciousness and despair. In a journal passage from 1848, he described how on his way home, “overwhelmed with ideas ready to be written down and in a sense so weak that I could scarcely walk,” he would often encounter a poor man, and if he refused to speak with him, the ideas would flee “and I would sink into the most dreadful spiritual tribulation at the idea that God could do to me what I had done to that man. But if I took the time to talk with the poor man, things never went that way.”
    Being out in public gave him almost his only social role, and he fretted over how his performance on the stage of Copenhagen would be interpreted. In a way, his appearances on the street were like his appearances on the printed page: endeavors to be in touch, but not too closely and on his own terms.