Walking: The Body, the Mind, the Environment: Bookmarks August, 2024 Update

Friends: One day in the distant past, you and I rose from crawling on the floor and walked on our two legs, unsteadily at first, but eventually moving effiiciently and effectively. This progression echoed the move that our tree dwelling ancestors made to become upright Homo sapiens first walking on the savannahs of East Africa as many as 7 million years ago. The simple physical act of walking has attracted the attention of writers since the time of the Bible (remember the 40 years of wandering in the desert?), and walking was the organizing theme for my month's reading.

Here are the books I read in August:

I'm a daily walker on the dirt roads and mountain bike trails in Vermont or in the city along the banks of the Charles and the streets of Cambridge and Boston. Walking has become my main source of exercise since my knees and hips told me it was time to move on from my daily 5 mile run and to forget about doing a fourth marathon. Instead, over the last nine years I've walked about 4 miles a day, rain or shine, here, there, or traveling.

I've also focused on walking as the medium for my amateur attempts at conceptual art, creating an idea and then realizing it. (https://epsteinreads.com/walks/) One of these projects was walking up Rowe Hill every day of the year. The trail up Rowe Hill begins just beyond the stone wall at the western perimeter of our Vermont property. I completed the 366th day of the calendar on December 20, 2012 finishing the cycle that began on August 23, 2003 with my first Rowe Hill walk. I've also walked the length of every street in Cambridge and did my 17 mile stroll down Broadway from the northern tip of Manhattan to Wall Street in just before COVID struck in 2020. I'm stil working on walking the 272 miles of the Long Trail in Vermont (89 miles down, 183 to go) and the 132 miles from Cambridge to Brownsville (just over 50% complete).

So, focusing on books about walking seemed a natural way to spend this glorious summer month. The books varied from Rebecca Solnit's scholarly but readable history of walking to books about Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, artists whose work documents their walks in natural settings around the world; from poems by Gary Snyder and Basho who spent years walking in the Sierras or in Japan to Thoreau's paeon to his long walks around Concord, Cape Cod, and Maine; and from Olivia Laing's search for paradise walking in gardens to Thich Nhat Hanh's walking meditation practice.

Along the way, I took a break with Daniel Silva's Gideon Allon in "The Secret Servant" and Robert B. Parker's Spenser in "Valediction" but was disappointed that neither of these books were their best efforts. Two other books off topic were William Styron's moving memoir about his struggle with depression, "Darkness Visible" and Amir Aczel's "Fermat's Last Theorem", the fascinating story of a mathematical formula which was finally proven after five centuries by a Princeton mathematician who spent seven years in his attic office figuring it out. And people tell me I'm obsessive!

Now onto walking. Hamish Fulton and Richard Long are contemporary British artists whose works on paper hang on our Cambridge walls and whose work we've recently seen at exhibits of their work in Boston and in Vermont. Each uses walking as their medium. While Fulton 'leaves no trace' and uses photographs and words to create his art, Long moves rocks, walks back and forth to create a path, or brings the stones or mud from his walks into the gallery to create his works. They are both working somewhere in the constellations of land art, conceptual art, and/or word art, but rather than trying to define them, just enjoy the beauty of their work and their ideas in the photographs and essays in "Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey", "Walking Artist", and "Richard Long: Circles Cycles Mud Stones".

Gary Snyder and Basho lived 350 years and thousands of miles apart but both of them walked and wrote poems derived from those walking experiences. Snyder, who at 94, spans the Beat poets and contemporary Pulitzer and National Book Awards, writes in "Left Out in the Rain" about his experiences as a logger and fire lookout in the Sierras, walking miles in dense forests and above the tree line. Basho who lived in the 1600's in Japan is credited with perfecting the haiku, the 17 syllable, three line poem which leaves much for the reader to complete, capturing both the momentary and eternity in this small form. More than 1000 of his haikus are collected in "Basho: The Complete Haikus." His classic prose poem "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" extols the 1500 mile walk he undertook into the interior of Honshu island.

Thoreau may be the best known walker in American history. His essay "Walking", though a bit over the top with American exceptionalism, extols his practice of a daily, 3-4 hour walk in the environs of Concord where he could easily come upon a place where "no man had been for years." His famous quote "in wildness is the preservation of the world" appears in this essay as do ideas that closely parallel those of Thich Nhat Hanh's book about walking meditation. "You are Here". Both authors, the 19th C. New England surveyor and pencil maker and the 21st C Vietnamese Buddhist monk, urge the walker to free the mind from daily cares and worries and be present, awake, and aware of the current moment and the gift of being alive in that setting--all we really have and all we can do anything about.

And that brings me to the two featured books this month, Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust" and Olivia Laing's "The Garden Against Time". These books share my most important characteristics for a great read: a fine, engaging style; a fascinating topic; thought-provoking connections between that topic and the social and cultural milieu; and the erudition needed to make relevant references to great writers of the past.

Solnit, who wrote her book nearly a quarter of a century before Laing's, situates walking in a social, historical, and cultural framework. She writes about walking philosophers such as Rousseau and Kierkegaard, walking poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, walking writers such as Charles Dickens and Viriginia Woolf, walking artists whose medium was walking itself such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, mountaineering and hiking practitioners like John Muir and Gary Snyder, the urban walking flaneur exemplified by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, pilgrimmages, Buddhist walking meditation, women walkers and streetwalkers, and walking clubs. In each case, she connects the dots between social and cultural changes and walking. She also makes the strong case that walking is the only human activity that enables the blending of body, mind, and environment. The book is a bit detailed, but it's an excellent example of fine writing about a fascinating topic.

When Laing and her husband bought an old estate in Suffolk, she turns her attention to resurrrecting the property's magnficent garden which had been neglected for years and was overgrown with weeds and invasive plants. While wielding her loppers and pruning shears, she digs into the story of the original designer of the garden and follows numerous tangents into topics as diverse as memory in W.G. Sebald's "Rings of Saturn", the notion of paradise in Milton's "Paradise Lost", the garden of one of my favorite British editors, Diana Athill ("Alive, Alive, Oh"), and William Morris's translation of his garden into arts and crafts wallpaper. Along the way, she observes that gardens reflect the power structure of the period noting the way in which the Enclosure Acts of the 18th C removed thousands of acres from the public domain and into private estates and how one family's slavery-supported sugar plantations in the American South translated to immense bedding gardens in their English garden. This is a fascinating, readable, and engaging book for anyone who gardens, walks, or seeks paradise in the outdoors.

In his NYT review of Laing's book, A.O. Scott wrote: “(Laing) belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience. If I were in an algorithmic mood, I’d mention Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, Jenny Diski (who was married to Ian Patterson until her death in 2016) and W.G. Sebald." I think Scott's observations are spot on and apply to Solnit as well. I highly recommend both of these books, especially if you're that wonderful combination of a reader/walker.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month continues to be linked to other sites as I figure out how to resurrect its own URL. It features a 'walking poet', Simon Armitage. A former Poet Laureate of the UK, Armitage walked the Pennine Way in 2012, 256 miles from the border of Scotland and England to Edale in the Peak District National Park in Yorkshire where he was born. Along the way, he stopped each night at a pub or inn where he read his poetry in exchange for his bed and breakfast. He wrote of this walking adventure in a fine book, "Walking Home: A Poet's Journey." Here are three of his poems:

In conclusion, a sobering thought from Shakespeare's "Cymbeline" as quoted by Olivia Laing: "Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers come to dust."

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