WALKING THE GEORGE AND RAY WAY

Well here’s a sort of interesting thing.  I opened George Orwell’s 1984, more or less at random and found this curious reference to walking.  Winston Smith “had walked several kilometres over pavements, and his varicose ulcer was throbbing. This was the second time in three weeks that he had missed an evening at the Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreation: to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous.”

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that this reads like a direct inspiration for Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian,” written just a few years after Orwell’s novel, but I’d never been so consciously aware of it till now.  Perhaps everybody else already was.

Orwell continues, “On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.”  

Bradbury’s pedestrian is often assumed to be walking in Los Angeles, though the text doesn't actually specify.  "Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows."

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Orwell walking, though I imagine he was part of the generation of Englishmen who did a lot of walking.  I once met a very, very old man in Suffolk who had gone beagling with Orwell, a rather specialized form of walking, admittedly. 

But Orwell did write this, in The Observer in April 1945: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation. For one has to remember that it is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The same desolation extends, at any rate in considerable patches, all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad.”

I haven't been able to find a photograph of Ray Bradbury walking either, and I know he did use a wheelchair toward the end of his life, but walkers in LA can visit both Ray Bradbury Square in downtown, and see his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  To experience Orwell's vision you only need walk down any street with a security camera.