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

Like Rousseau, he had an exacting relationship with the public. He chose to publish many of his works under pseudonyms and then to complain that he was considered an idler, since none knew he went home from his roaming to write. After he broke off his engagement with Regine Olsen in what was to be the defining tragedy of his life, he continued to see her on the street but nowhere else. Years later, they would both appear repeatedly at the same time on a portside street, and he worried over what this meant. The street, which is the most casual arena for people with full private lives, was the most personal for him.
    The other great crisis of his uneventful life came when he wrote a small attack on Denmark’s scurrilous satirical magazine the Corsair. Though its editor admired him, the magazine began to publish mocking pictures and paragraphs about him, and the Copenhagen public took up the joke. Most of the jokes were mild enough—they depicted him as having trouser legs of uneven lengths, made fun of his elaborate pseudonyms and compositional style, published pictures of him as a spry figure in a frock coat that belled out around his spiky legs. But the parodies made him better known than he wished to be, achingly anxious about being mocked and seeing mockery everywhere. Kierkegaard seems to have exaggerated the effect of the Corsair ’s jabs and suffered horribly—not least because he no longer felt free to roam the city. “My atmosphere has been tainted for me. Because of my melancholy and my enormous work I needed a situation of solitude in the crowd in order to rest. So I despair. I can no longer find it. Curiosity surrounds me everywhere.” One of his biographers says that it was this final crisis of his life, after those of his father and his fiancée, that pushed him intohis last phase as a theological rather than a philosophical and aesthetic writer. Nevertheless, he continued to walk the streets of Copenhagen, and it was on one of those walks that he collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he died some weeks later.
    Like Rousseau, Kierkegaard is a hybrid, a philosophical writer rather than a philosopher proper. Their work is often descriptive, evocative, personal, and poetically ambiguous, in sharp contrast to the closely reasoned argument central to the Western philosophical tradition. It has room for delight and personality and something as specific as the sound of an organ grinder in a street or rabbits on an island. Rousseau branched out into the novel, the autobiography, and the reverie, and play with forms was central to Kierkegaard’s work: creating a massive postscript to a relatively short essay, layering pseudonymous authors like Chinese boxes within his texts. As a writer his heirs seem to be literary experimentalists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, who play with the way form, voice, reference, and other devices shape meaning.
    Rousseau and Kierkegaard’s walking is only accessible to us because they wrote about it in more personal, descriptive, and specific works—Rousseau’s Confessions and Reveries, Kierkegaard’s journals—rather than staying in the impersonal and universal realm of philosophy at its most pure. Perhaps it is because walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travelers’ accounts, and first-person essays. Too, these eccentrics focus on walking as a means of modulating their alienation, and this kind of alienation was a new phenomenon in intellectual history. They were neither immersed in the society around them nor—save in Kierkegaard’s later years, after the Corsair affair—withdrawn from it in the tradition of the religious contemplative. They were in the world but not of