A Philosophy of Walking (5 page)

I
will always remember what he said. We were climbing a steep path in the Italian Alps. Mateo was my senior by at least half a century, being over seventy-five years old at that time. He was whipcord-thin, with big rough hands, a lined face and an erect posture. He kept his arms folded when walking, as if feeling cold, and wore beige canvas trousers.

It was he who taught me to walk. Although I was saying just now: you don't learn to walk, at least here, no technique, no panic about getting it right or not, about doing it this way rather than that, no pressure to pull yourself together, practise, concentrate. Everyone knows how to walk. One foot in front of the other, that's the proper rhythm, the
good distance to go somewhere, anywhere. And all you have to do is resume: one foot in front of the other.

I say he ‘taught' me for the sake of brevity and effect. We had been walking for several minutes on a climbing path and began to feel a sort of pressure from behind. A group of young people, boisterous, wanting to hurry and overtake us, trod a little noisily to make their presence felt. So we stood aside and let the loud, hurrying troupe pass, and were thanked with slightly smug smiles. It was then, as he watched them recede, that Mateo said: ‘Well look, they're afraid they won't get there, wanting to walk at that speed!'

The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn't exactly the opposite of speed. In the first place it's the extreme regularity of paces, a uniformity. Here one might almost say that a good walker glides, or perhaps that his legs rotate, describing circles. A bad walker may sometimes go fast, accelerate, then slow down. His movements are jerky, his legs form clumsy angles. His speed will be made of sudden accelerations, followed by heavy breathing. Large voluntary movements, a new decision every time the body is pushed or pulled, a red perspiring face. Slowness really is the opposite of
haste
. When we reached the summit and caught up with the ‘sportsmen', they were sitting down, discussing their time with enthusiasm and making incomprehensible calculations. The reason they were hurrying like that was that they wanted to make a particular time. We stopped for a minute to look at the view. Then,
while the group continued to make long commentaries and interminable comparisons, we slowly started back.

The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It's an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal.

But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this; then that; and then something else. When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship. Thus a mountain skyline that stays with you all day, which you observe in different lights, defines and articulates itself. When you are walking, nothing moves: only imperceptibly do the hills draw closer, the surroundings change. In a train or car, we
see a mountain coming towards us. The eye is quick, active, it thinks it has understood everything, grasped it all. When you are walking, nothing really moves: it is rather that presence is slowly established in the body. When we are walking, it isn't so much that we are drawing nearer, more that the things out there become more and more insistent in our body. The landscape is a set of tastes, colours, scents which the body absorbs.

The Passion for Escape – Rimbaud
 

V
erlaine called him ‘the man with soles of wind'. The man himself, when still very young, had described himself thus: ‘I'm a pedestrian, nothing more.' Rimbaud walked throughout his life.

Obstinately, with passion. Between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he walked to reach great cities: the Paris of literary hopes, to become known in Parnassian circles, to meet poets like himself, desperately lonely and longing to
be loved (read his poems). To Brussels, to pursue a career in journalism. Between twenty and twenty-four, he several times tried the route to the South, returning home for the winter. Preparation for travel … There were incessant shuttles between Mediterranean ports (Marseille or Genoa) and Charleville; walking towards the sun. And from the age of twenty-five until his death, desert roads.

At fifteen, drawn to the city of poets, and feeling lonely and decidedly redundant in Charleville, Rimbaud took off for Paris, his head full of naïve dreams. He left on foot very early one August morning, without a word to anyone. He walked probably to Givet, and there took the train. But selling his books – valuable ones, for he had been an excellent pupil – did not produce enough money to pay for the full journey to the capital. On arrival at the Gare de Strasbourg, he found the police waiting: he was arrested for theft, deemed a vagabond, and taken immediately to the local police station, then to the Mazas prison. His teacher of rhetoric, the famous Georges Izambard, rushed to his rescue and secured his pupil's release by paying the railway company the unpaid portion of his fare. The line to Charleville being still cut because of the Franco-Prussian war, Rimbaud went to stay at Douai, with his protector's family. There followed a sequence of happy days, talking literature and being spoiled by big sisters. But his mother sent for him.

Barely a month later, Rimbaud sold some more books
and ran away again. He took the train as far as Fumay, then continued on foot, from village to village (Vireux, Givet) along the Meuse. To Charleroi. ‘Eight days earlier, I had ripped my ankle-boots on the stones of the roads. I was entering Charleroi.'

There he offered his services to the
Journal de Charleroi
, which turned him down. Rimbaud went on to Brussels, penniless, still on foot, to find, or so he hoped, his protector Izambard. ‘I set off, my fists in my torn pockets; my overcoat too was becoming ideal; I was going under the sky, Muse! And I was your vassal; Oh good heavens, what splendid amours I dreamed!'

Fifty kilometres of joyous exclamation, hands in pockets and dreaming of literary glory and love. But Izambard wasn't there. Durand, the teacher's friend, gave him enough to set him on his way. Rimbaud did not go straight home, but to Douai, to his new family: ‘It's me, I've come back.' He arrived charged with a poetry born all along the roads – illuminations of flights and escapades – composed to the rhythms of paths and swinging arms.

A poetry of well-being, of festive relaxation in country inns. Satisfaction with the day's progress, the body filled with space. Youth.

‘Blissfully happy, I stretched my legs under the table.'

Days and days of walking through golden autumn colours. Laughing outdoor nights, on roadside verges, under the glittering roof of stars.

‘My inn was at the sign of the Great Bear. – My stars in the sky making a gentle fuss.'

Rimbaud made careful fair copies of his inventions on big white sheets. Happy in the affection of his new family. He was sixteen. On 1 November Rimbaud's mother (‘mouth of shadow') ordered Izambard to return her son forthwith, via the police ‘to avoid expense'.

In February 1871, with the Franco-Prussian war under way, Rimbaud still dreamed of Paris, of which he had only seen the inside of a prison the first time. Charleville was still in the grip of winter. Arthur took on airs, allowed his hair to grow to an unseemly length, walked proudly up and down the main street smoking a pipe. He fretted and fumed; again without saying anything, secretly, he prepared his next escape. This time he had sold a silver watch, and had enough to pay for a rail ticket to his destination.

By 25 February he was wandering through Paris, gazing excitedly into bookshop windows, wondering what was new in poetry, sleeping in coal barges, living on gathered scraps and leavings, seeking feverishly to make contact with the literary Brotherhood. But it was not a time for literature: the Prussians were coming, the town had veiled itself in darkness. Stomach and pockets empty, Rimbaud crossed the enemy lines to return home, on foot all the way but sometimes given lifts on farm carts. He reached home ‘at night, almost naked and suffering from bad bronchitis'.

Did he leave again that spring? Legend or reality? An enigma, anyway … Will we ever know for sure? Rimbaud would have trembled eagerly at news of the Paris Commune. He must have chafed in Charleville, knowing that they were in rebellion down there, he the author of a
communist constitution … His childhood had been pious, but he had become fiercely republican, rabidly anti-clerical. News of the uprising, in the name of liberty and fraternity, entranced him: ‘order is vanquished'. The decree establishing the Commune was issued in March. He is said to have been spotted in Paris in April. But not for certain. Ernest Delahaye recounts that Arthur joined the communard militia, that he enrolled as a sniper at Babylon barracks … the episode may have lasted a fortnight. Having arrived on a coal barge, he is thought to have returned home on foot, destitute and starving. It's difficult when you have no money.

He returned to Paris for a fourth visit (or was it only the third?). This time, though, was to be the real consecration. Autumn 1871, just as he turned seventeen. This time, too, his mother had been informed: an official trip, almost. Because he was expected there; invited, it would seem, by a smitten Verlaine to whom he had sent his poems (‘Come, come quickly,
great dear soul'
). A collection had been organized to pay his train fare. He was carrying his
Bateau ivre
by way of offering, qualification and evidence.

There followed, as we know, three years during which Verlaine kept Rimbaud, three long years of stormy, passionate relations: thoughtless follies, three tormented visits to London together, sordid binges, monstrous storms and sublime reconciliations, until the unhappy pistol shot in Brussels (wounding Rimbaud in the arm) which ended everything. Verlaine went to prison, while his provocateur-victim made several more returns to the starting line
(Charleville or Roche). As always, Rimbaud was bored rigid, but his cavortings with Verlaine had led to his exclusion from literary circles. From his first appearance in Paris his reputation had been that of a filthy brat: a dirty, unpleasant hooligan and inveterate drunkard.

He was twenty in 1875, and had written his
Season in Hell
and
Illuminations
, also (perhaps) a
Spiritual Hunt
which is permanently lost. The publication of
A Season in Hell
had been a sad disaster. He couldn't pay the publisher, and had received only a handful of copies. He was never to see his
Illuminations
in print. A street urchin had transformed the whole of literature in the space of five years. He would never write another poem.

Plenty of letters of course, written in telegraphic style (newsflashes), but not a single poem. He still walked a lot, obstinately. But now he wanted to travel far; alone in his room, he learned languages. He learned German, applied himself to Italian, glanced at Spanish, worked on a Greek-Russian dictionary, doubtless also picked up rudiments of Arabic. For five years, he spent his winters learning. Long walks were for springtime.