YAY - I GOT A NOT BAD REVIEW

 Sands of an Hourglass: On Geoff Nicholson’s “Walking on Thin Air”

By Tom ZoellnerFebruary 6, 2024

 

Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps by Geoff Nicholson

 

MEMOIRS ABOUT the walking life are, by definition, all over the map. But they tend to fall into one of two general categories.

There’s the directed hunt, in which the author has pointed themselves at a specific target: the end of a long trail, a shrine, a lost geography, a bit of treasure—books like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks (2010), or any number of accounts of trekking the Santiago de Compostela.

Then there’s the musings of the ambler not going anywhere in particular but writing about the multiple joys of simply traveling around on foot, usually in cities, musing at the unfolding scenery—books like Alfred Kazin and David Finn’s Our New York (1989) or Thinking on My Feet: The Small Joy of Putting One Foot in Front of Another (2018).

Geoff Nicholson’s new book Walking on Thin Air: A Life’s Journey in 99 Steps is firmly in the second group, a well-established genre that lends itself to episodic structure and ample philosophizing. Nicholson’s unenviable twist, though, is that he’s walking on the sands of an hourglass. He has a diagnosis of a rare bone marrow cancer—“not rare enough, obviously.” But this writer from the industrial English Midlands has been walking all his life and intends to “continue as long as [he] can.”

Nicholson is a marvelously direct writer of indirect subjects who doesn’t have a lot of truck with pretense or a sense of misgiving about his subjects. He treads where he likes and doesn’t seem to care about commercialism when describing his enthusiasms. His 1996 novel, Footsucker, was an apologia for shoe fetishism wrapped in a murder mystery. And his further tributes to the parts of us that meet the ground include two previous works on the ambulatory life: Walking in Ruins (2013) and The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism (2008).

The artistry embedded in this basic act can be reduced to a simple apothegm. “I go to places,” writes Nicholson, a contributing editor of this publication. “I walk when I’m there, I look around, I write about what I see and feel. It’s not the only thing I do with my life, but it’s probably the best part.”

Turns out that Southern California is one of Nicholson’s prime turfs: “When people used to ask me why I’d moved to Los Angeles I always said, ‘Oh, I came for the walking.’ That was met with varying degrees of hilarity.” But he gets the last laugh. His favorite hiking desert is the Mojave, where the myriad dangers led him to embrace the traveler’s counsel of “creative cowardice” favored by Reyner Banham, another Englishman in California. It was also the place where an unnatural fatigue one hot day prompted him to make a doctor’s appointment, which led to his cancer discovery. (He did not blame the desert.)

Nicholson also crafts an ode to Franklin Avenue, “one of the less glamorous and less celebrated streets of Los Angeles” with none of the name recognition of its neighbors, and which locals think of primarily as a glorified on-ramp to the 101. Through some detective work, he locates the house where Joan Didion reported on the moral chaos of the 1960s and posed in front of a Corvette. It’s now a spiritual retreat called Shumei America Hollywood Center.
But this is a rare example of chasing an image, or its afterimage. Nicholson does not go for oft-trodden paths that project a certain civic or cultural iconography. What would be the point of that? “You can’t really walk in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or on the banks of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River—though I’ve tried to do both—because essentially these places are inventions, artistic creations,” he writes. “They exist sure enough, but they exist on the page or on canvas and, of course, in the mind and imagination of the reader or viewer.”

As long walks can take meandering patterns, Nicholson bounces among subjects in numbered sections, not always connected. The reader quickly becomes aware that Nicholson is less concerned with subject than motion. As he puts it: “Admittedly I would in general prefer to walk in the Peak District than through the nearby industrial estate, but I’m not averse to walking through industrial estates, and true enlightenment might not even recognise the difference.”

In the days before GPS could be slid into a pants pocket, Nicholson often shunned the conspicuous and deliberate act of carrying a paper map, especially in London, where “a general sense of direction, a sense of how neighborhoods related to each other,” was often good enough.

Do the “neighborhoods” of this book relate to one another? Not always. Part of the appeal of discursive narratives sorted into number-headed chapters is the thematic puzzle of how things that shouldn’t fit into other things somehow do, or are made to, through the sleight of the writing. That assemblage isn’t always apparent here—the neighborhood is a jumble of architecture, and the promise of the subtitle, “a life’s journey,” resembles more of a stroll through a bric-a-brac emporium.

Then there’s the “thin air,” which provides the dominant key of the book. Nicholson keeps finding ways to drift away from seriously contemplating his cancer diagnosis. Perhaps, it could be credibly argued, this is a mimetic device. Such medical knowledge may indeed foster a constant desire to think about other things—to find alternative paths. Who can live their life for very long in constant dread? Come look at this discarded magazine on the sidewalk. And this colorful rock.

Herein lies a matter that some readers may consider a deficiency. Nicholson spends no time on the spiritual aspects of living and dying, not even to dismiss them. Does he think there’s a survival of the soul—a hidden path soon to become visible? We don’t get to know. The mysteries of dying are perfectly replicated by his authorial silence on this point.

Instead, when contemplating his own mortality, Nicholson turns to some of the imagery he likes best: “If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, then every journey, of whatever length, must also end with a single step. I wonder exactly where and when that step will be in my own case. I can’t say I’m ready for it, but I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

Nicholson’s writing career has been varied, admirable, and courageous. He stops to notice uncommercial and even bizarre subjects, shunning well-traveled roads. He goes where he likes. He gets out often. Nobody can imitate him.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Tom Zoellner is an editor-at-large at LARB and a professor of English at Chapman University. He is the author of eight nonfiction books, including The Heartless Stone, Uranium, The National Road, Rim to River, and Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize in history.

 

Sands of an Hourglass: On Geoff Nicholson’s “Walking on Thin Air” | Los Angeles Review of Books (lareviewofbooks.org)

ROAMING WITH NICHOLSON

 

Do you want to hear me on a podcast talking to Stefan Van Noren about walking on his blog Nature Revisited?

Well, why wouldn't you?

This is Stefan Van Norden 

and this is a link to the podcast

https://noordenproductions.com/nature-revisited-blog/episode-115-geoff-nicholson-the-right-to-roamx

JUMPING JELLICOES

 

If you grew up in Sheffield, as I did, there’s a good chance that many of your formative walking experiences took place in the Peak District.  I was going to say it’s ‘just down the road’ from Sheffield, but in fact parts of Sheffield are now actually in the Peak District.

 

Much of my own walking, often with my dad though sometimes with others, centred around Castleton which is at the head of the Hope Valley – undulating peaks and tors, some of them exhaustingly steep, and pierced by various caverns. There was a local expression, at least in our house, ‘We live in hope but we’ll die in Castleton.’ 

 

PHOTO BY JOHN FINNEY PHOTOGRAPHY

And at some point as we looked across the Hope Valley we’d see a white industrial conglomeration in the distance. It’s what used to be called The Hope Valley Cement Works, now Breedon Hope Cement Works.

 

Most observers would think it’s a blot on the landscape, but looking back I can’t believe how unsurprising it seemed.  Perhaps this was because wherever you walked in Sheffield you were bound to see industrial sites, mostly concerned with the steel and cutlery industries, so in one sense it was just more of the same.  But I’m still surprised by how accepting everybody seemed to be.  It was just part of the landscape. I understand there are now two public footpaths that go through the site but if they were there in my day, I certainly wasn’t aware of them.

 

         Only recently did I decide to look into the history a little. The Hope Cement Works opened at 1929, and was extended in 1935-8, against some resistance,  not enough to halt the plans but enough for the owners to bring in Geoffrey Jellicoe, architect, landscape architect, town planner and garden designer, and by many accounts one of the great garden theorists, to create some sympathetic landscaping, using waste products from the mining operation, to hide what were essentially two big quarries.  This wasn’t until 1942 when – for Pete’s sake – there was a war on, but Jellicoe produced a plan of intent for future quarrying, which held up at least until the 1980s. Jellicoe was born in 1900 lived to be 95

         

         Now, Geoffrey Jellicoe is some way from being an open book to me, though I knew the name, and a little further research revealed thatI’d done more walking in Jellicoe’s footsteps than I’d imagined.  For instance, I now know that when I walked around the pedestrianized center of Gloucester I was treading the ‘Via Sacre,’ part of the Jellicoe’s redevelopment plan for the city centre.

 

I’ve been in Fitzroy Square in London which was pedestrianised in the 1970s, as part of a Jellicoe scheme.  I know I’ve been tothe RHS garden at Wisley where Jellicoe designed the Canal Garden, though I can’t say I remember it.  And I’ve always been an admirer of the Ben Nicholson (no relation) wall in the Jellicoe-designed garden at Sutton Place, but I’ve only ever seen pictures.

 

And then, while looking for something quite else on a map of London I spotted something called Jellicoe Gardens, north of Kings Cross and St Pancras stations.         

 

Now, the Jellicoe Gardens weren’t designed by Jellicoe but by Tom Stuart-Smith Ltd who were, and I’ll quote, ‘commissioned by Argent to work with them and the Aga Khan Development Network to design a garden inspired by the early Persian garden traditions, where sunlight, shade and water are balanced to create a place of calm, comfort and quiet reflection.’  A visit seemed to be in order.

 

         That bit of territory around Jellicoe Gardens is now all linked open squares and fresh out of the box architecture, and nearby is Lewis Cubitt Park which seemed a bleak and desolate place on the day of my visit, though you can just about see one or two people walking there.

And as for Jellicoe Gardens themselves, they seemed to be, let’s say, minimalist. I saw exactly one person there, sitting on a bench looking forlorn.

This may be only to say that my visit was in mid-February and not much was growing and thriving as yet, but the place undeniably has good bones.  And I really did like the pergola, if that’s the right word, through which you see the zesty modern architecture all around it.  A second visit will surely be called for.

To quote Tom Stuart-Smith Ltd again, ‘Inspiration has been taken primarily from the great garden Bagh-e Fin, a traditional Persian garden located in Kashan, Iran. It is on a much larger scale, but the plan is quite similar.’ I can’t say how many visitors to the Jellicoe Gardens know anything about Geoffrey Jellicoe or about Persian Gardens, though since they’re adjacent to the Aga Khan Centre perhaps they may be more familiar with the latter than the former.  

 

On a final not-quite-Jellicoe note, and returning obliquely to thoughts of the Hope Valley, I’ve observed that cement works are curious beasts wherever they are. When I lived in Los Angeles, and I sometimes walked along La Brea Avenue and there amongst the rather fashionable shops and restaurants was another cement works – in its way even more surprising than the one in Hope Valley.  This was the CEMEX Hollywood Concrete Plant, which had been in business for over 60 years.  It was a magnificent monster of a place covering one and a half acres, although when I mentioned it to Angelenos, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. 

 

In fact I gather there are now plans to build a huge apartment block on the site.  I’m not sure whether or not that’s a pity.

 

SHANDY WALKING

 

This is rather good, I think, from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768):

‘I was walking down that which leads from the Carousal to the Palais Royal, and observing a little boy in some distress at the side of the gutter which ran down the middle of it, I took hold of his hand and help’d him over. Upon turning up his face to look at him after, I perceived he was about forty.—Never mind, said I, some good body will do as much for me when I am ninety.’

 

Well, A Sentimental Journey is essentially a novel, so the narrator is not exactly the author, but crossing the road when he was 90 was not a problem Sterne ever had.  He died some months after A Sentimental Journey was published, aged 54.

And then, there was a piece in The London Review of Books, by Thomas Keymer, about the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of satire, and about ‘getting the wrong end of the stick.’  He writes:‘The cleverest inheritor of the phenomenon was Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy (1759-67) intersperses its narrative with explicit rebukes to imagined readers …  The work was there to be grasped or debated as the reader wished, and when one of them sent Sterne a walking stick as a gift, it was, Sterne replied, ‘in no sense more Shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one’.

I must say I’d never seen a walking stick with more than one handle, but I find they do exist, like this:

 

But that’s not the same as grasping the wrong end.  In most cases, with most walking sticks, there’s surely only one end you’d really want to grasp.

THE DANGERS OF WALKING – ONE OF A VERY LONG SERIES

 

 

Here’s the kind of thing you don’t read every day. In fact I read it in the Evening Standard on January 12^thand have been waiting to hear further developments, but as far as I can tell there haven’t been any. 

There in the paper, along with the above picture, was the headline ‘Crumbling Justice’ and the sub-headline ‘Pedestrian hurt after old Bailey Masonry Crashes into the Street Below.’  

 

From this you and I would imagine a someone was walking down the street, and a lump of stone fell off the building from a great height and hit the walker below, But then you read the article (by Tristan Kirk, who I think also took the pictures), and it reads, ‘A member of the public was hospitalised after masonry over the “decaying” historic entrance to the Old Bailey crumbled and crashed into the street below. 

‘No one was hurt when the stone fell from the building, but a pedestrian was injured after tumbling over debris on the pavement before the area had been cordoned off.’

 

Am I wrong to be disappointed by this?  Walking along and being hit by an unidentified falling object has a lot of drama, maybe even cosmic drama, this kind of thing:

     But tripping over a lump of stone that’s lying on the ground, really lacks grandeur.  The fallen piece doesn’t even look to have been very big. The little white bit on the statue in the picture below is where it fell from. 

 

Interestingly it seems to me, the pedestrian is not named in the news item. I wonder if the journalist was sparing his or her blushes.  I don’t mean to mock this or any other pedestrian but falling over in the street and ending up in hospital is pretty hopeless and humiliating.  I know because I’ve done it.  And there wasn’t even a lump of masonry to trip over.