A Philosophy of Walking (3 page)

Now began the third major period of his life: ten years between the summer of 1879 and the beginning of 1889. He was living on the combination of three small grants that enabled him to live very modestly, stay in small inns, afford the train fare from the mountains to the sea, from the sea to the mountains, or sometimes to Venice to visit Peter Gast. It was at this time that he became the peerless walker of legend. Nietzsche walked, he walked as others work. And he worked while he was walking.

The first summer he discovered his mountain, the Upper Engadine, and the following year his village, Sils-Maria. The air was clear there, the wind brisk, the light piercing. He detested stifling heat, so spent every summer there until the collapse (apart from the year of Lou). He wrote to his friends Overbeck and Köselitz that he had found his own nature, his element; and to his mother he wrote that he had found ‘the best paths that the half-blind man I have become could hope for, and the most tonic air' (July 1879). This was his landscape, and he felt related to it ‘by blood, nay even more to me'. Starting that first summer, he walked, alone, for up to eight hours a day, and wrote
The Wanderer and His Shadow
. All of it except a few lines was thought out en route, and scribbled down in pencil in six small notebooks.

He spent the winter in southern towns, essentially Genoa, the bay of Rapallo and later Nice (‘I walk on average an hour in the morning, three hours in the afternoon, at a good pace – always the same route: it is beautiful enough to bear repetition', March 1888), Menton just once (‘I have found eight walks', November 1884). The hills were his writing bench, the sea his great arch (‘The sea and the pure sky! Why did I so torture myself in the past?' January 1881).

Thus walking, looking down on the world and men, he composed in the open air, imagined, discovered, grew excited, was frightened by what he found, astonished and gripped by what came to him on his walks:

In those ten years he wrote his greatest books, from
The Dawn
to
On the Genealogy of Morality
, from
The Gay Science
to
Beyond Good and Evil
, not forgetting
Zarathustra
. He became the hermit (‘find myself once again a hermit, and do ten hours a day of hermit's walking', July 1880); the solitary, the wanderer.

Walking here is not, as with Kant, a distraction from work, a minimal ablution enabling the body to recover from sitting in one place, stooping, bent double. For Nietzsche, it was the work's precondition. More than a relaxation, or even an accompaniment, walking was truly his element.

Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.

There is also the quest for a different light. Libraries are always too dark. The heaping, the piling up, the infinite juxtaposition of volumes, the height of the stacks, everything converges to obstruct daylight.

Other books reflect piercing mountain light, or the sea sparkling in sunshine. And above all, colours. Libraries are grey, and grey are the books written in them: overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explicatory prudence, indefinite refutations.

Think of the scribe's body: his hands, his feet, his shoulders and legs. Think of the book as an expression of physiology. In all too many books the reader can sense the seated body, doubled up, stooped, shrivelled in on itself. The walking body is unfolded and tensed like a bow: opened to wide spaces like a flower to the sun, exposed torso, tensed legs, lean arms.

Our first question about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: can they walk?

Books by authors imprisoned in their studies, grafted to their chairs, are heavy and indigestible. They are born of a compilation of the other books on the table. They are like fattened geese: crammed with citations, stuffed with references, weighed down with annotations. They are weighty,
obese,
boring
, and are read slowly, with difficulty. Books made from other books, by comparing lines with other lines, by repeating what others have said of what still others have thoroughly explained. They verify, specify, rectify; a phrase becomes a paragraph, a whole chapter. A book becomes the commentary of a hundred books on a single sentence from another book.

An author who composes while walking, on the other hand, is free from such bonds; his thought is not the slave of other volumes, not swollen with verifications, nor weighted with the thought of others. It contains no explanation owed to anyone: just thought, judgement, decision. It is thought born of a movement, an impulse. In it we can feel the body's elasticity, the rhythm of a dance. It retains and expresses the energy, the springiness of the body. Here is thought about the thing itself, without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition. The result will not be long and meticulous exegesis, but thoughts that are light and profound. That is really the challenge: the lighter a thought, the more it rises, and becomes profound by rising – vertiginously – above the thick marshes of conviction, opinion, established thought. While books conceived in the library are on the contrary superficial and heavy. They remain on the level of recopying.

Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.

This leads neatly, in conclusion, to Nietzsche's eulogy of the foot: we write only with the hand; we write well ‘only
with our feet'. The foot is an excellent witness, perhaps the most reliable. We should notice if, while reading, the foot ‘pricks up its ears' – for the foot listens. We read in Zarathustra's second ‘dance song': ‘My toes rose up to listen; for a dancer's ears are carried on his toes' – when it shivers with pleasure because invited to dance, at the beginning,
outside
.

To judge the quality of a piece of music, we should trust the foot. If, when listening, the wish arises in the foot to mark the rhythm, it's a good sign. All music is an invitation to lightness. Wagner's music depresses the foot in this respect: it makes it panic, it forgets how to place itself. Worse still, it languishes, drags, turns this way and that, gets irritated. While listening to Wagner, as Nietzsche tells us in his last texts, it's impossible to feel the desire to dance, for one is submerged in swirling meanders of music, vague torrents, muddled yearnings.

Nietzsche walked all day long, scribbling down here and there what the walking body – confronting sky, sea, glaciers – breathed into his thought. I am, says Zarathustra, ‘a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience – a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.'

With Nietzsche, walking meant rising, scrambling, climbing. At Sorrento in 1876, he chose for his daily walks the mountain paths behind the town. From Nice, he liked to climb the path leading straight uphill to the small village of Èze, where he was almost vertically above the sea. From Sils-Maria he took the paths climbing towards high valleys. At Rapallo, he conquered Monte Allegro (‘the principal summit in the region').

In Gérard de Nerval's case, forest paths – flat labyrinths – and gentle plains invite the walker's body to softness, to languor. And memories arise like eddying mists. The air is more bracing with Nietzsche, and above all sharp, transparent. The thought is trenchant, the body wide awake, trembling. So instead of sluggishly returning memories there are judgements being made: diagnoses, discoveries, interpolations, verdicts.

The climbing body demands effort; it is under continuous tension. It is an aid to thought in the pursuit of examination: pushing on a little further, a little higher. It's important not to weaken, but to mobilize energy to advance, to place the foot firmly and hoist the body slowly, then restore balance. So with thought: an idea to rise to something even more astonishing, unheard-of,
new
. And then again: it is a matter of gaining altitude. There are thoughts that can only occur at 6,000 feet above the plains and mournful shores.

To know that the world swarms under his feet.
Suave turba magna
 … how sweet it is to perceive, through the clear glacial air, the motionless crowd stagnating on the spot far below? But no, Nietzsche's aristocratic outlook does not extend to such arrogant contempt.

Rather it is that for thinking one needs a detached outlook, to be at a distance, to have clear air. One needs to be unconstrained to think far. And what then do details, definitions, exactitudes mean? It is the armature of human destiny that one needs to see laid out. From very high up one sees the movement of landscapes, the design of hills. And thus with history: Antiquity, Christianity, modernity … what do they produce in the way of archetypes, characters, essences? The moment your nose is buried in dates, in facts, everything falls back on your own clenched peculiarity. Whereas the need is to construct fictions, myths,
general
destinies.

We still need to climb a good stretch of road, slowly, but ever higher, in order to reach a properly detached point of view on our old civilization.

Something clear, like the line of a road. Not the sedentary man's stupid failure to understand, but rather the compassion Nietzsche had always recognized as his problem (‘ever since I was a child, I have never ceased to notice that “pity
is my greatest peril” ', September 1884). That compassion on seeing human beings busying themselves, going to Mass or entertainments, seeking recognition from their peers, becoming mired in sad images: poor in themselves. While from above, from a detached position, one understands what made mankind sick: the poison of sedentary moralities.