Andie Miller, the author of Slow Motion: Stories About Walking (which is a very good book), sends me the article below from the website of The Times of Johannesburg, which mentions me in
passing, and which is a very interesting piece even without that. I especially like the suggestion that only a man with a heart of stone can fail to laugh at Werner Herzog's
The part I find especially fascinating is the sentence that reads, “For me walking
is like drinking - it makes me happy but I can do it only when I'm happy
already.” I find that completely unlike
my own experience. Walking when I’m
happy is good, of course, but it’s not transformative: I tend to stay happy. Whereas walking when I’m unhappy is the best way I know to get rid of that unhappiness.
Ah walkers, damn them: no two of
them are ever exactly alike.
*
Walking for dear life
Darrel Bristow-Bovey | 21
October, 2013 00:30
I received a message this week from a man who doesn't want to be
named. He'd read about how much I like walking, and he wanted me to know that
his brother is, right now, walking from Durban to Johannesburg.
He isn't necessarily walking in a straight line, and when he
gets there he might turn around and walk back. He isn't walking for charity and
he isn't dressed in a rhino suit. He won't tweet about it or blog or get interviewed
on breakfast television. He doesn't want your attention or your money. He's
walking because although he isn't religious or especially superstitious, on
some level he believes that if he walks his sister may not die of the illness
that is killing her.
I wondered if he had read The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,
by Rachel Joyce. An old man named Harold Fry learns that a friend is on the
last lap of cancer and sets off, unprepared, to walk across England to see her.
He isn't sure what he'll say when he gets there, but he wants her to know that
he is coming. He hopes, if hope is the word, that his walk will keep her alive.
It's an act of faith but not in anything. It's an action to
exert what small influence a man can exert over an indifferent universe, which
is to say, no influence at all. He walks because it's all he can do, and
something might be better than nothing. It's a lovely book and if it goes on a
bit towards the end, well, that's the nature of very long walks.
The unacknowledged urtext for Harold Fry is surely Werner
Herzog's Of Walking In Ice. In the icy winter of 1974 Herzog received word that
the German film historian Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris. Herzog instantly
walked to see her. He was in Munich at the time. He walked for three weeks
through conditions so cold and grim you'd have to be Werner Herzog to endure it
or deserve it.
It would take a hard Wildean heart to read Herzog's frozen prose
and hear his lugubrious Wagnerian voice intoning, "A black morning, gloomy
and cold, spread like a pestilence. I curse Creation" , without laughing
out loud. Herzog walked for three weeks, on foot except when he accepted lifts,
single-minded except when he took a detour to see the birthplace of Joan of
Arc. Lotte Eisner lived another eight years.
The writer Geoff Nicholson tells how, inspired by this story, he
went on pilgrimage to Herzog's home in Beverly Hills to ask him to blurb The
Lost Art of Walking. He walked in the faith that if he walked, Herzog would
surely agree. Alas, not all walks have happy endings.
I love walking, but not as an act of faith, or even penance.
Nicholson also tells about Old Leatherman, an unusually ambulatory gentleman of
the highway who between 1858 and 1889 walked a 500km route around precise
points of Connecticut and New York State, dressed all in leather. The circuit
took 34 days and he walked every day, wordless, never taking a day or an item
off.
The odour of unlaundered leather didn't bother him because he
was a Frenchman named Jules Bouglay, who loved a woman and worked a year's
apprenticeship in her father's leather business to prove his worthiness.
Regrettably, he ruined the company, bankrupted Dad and lost his love. He went
to America and spent the next thirty-some years walking to expiate his guilt. I
like to think he returned at the end to claim her, although he might have had
some difficulty proving what he'd been doing all that time. Maybe he should
have tweeted about it after all.
I try to walk between 10km and 15km each day - ambling and
mooching and occasionally sauntering (from sainte-terre, or "holy
ground", initially used to denote pilgrims who walked to the Holy Land,
and then, sarcastically, for people too lazy to walk to the Holy Land). Since I
started walking seven years ago, I no longer get depressed.
For me walking is like drinking - it makes me happy but I can do
it only when I'm happy already. If I have quarrelled or I'm fretful I often set
out to walk all day but I become panicky. I feel exposed on foot in the world
if my heart is not at ease, as though something terrible and irreversible is
about to happen. I become gripped with the breathless fear I sometimes get
descending underwater, and I have to hurry home.
So
I couldn't do what the brother of my new friend is doing, but my thoughts are
with them both. Thoughts don't change anything. Neither does prayer. Neither
does walking, but you have to do something.
You can read it on the website by clicking here:
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