Two Books on Walking

In this post, I would like to review two books about walking, two books that look at this activity from divergent perspectives.  The first is entitled In Praise of Walking (The Bodley Head, London, 2019) by Shane O’Mara who is Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin, and is a Principal Investigator in, and was the Director of, the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience from 2009-2016.  The second book is called The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. (Penguin Books, 2013) by Professor Robert Macfarlane who is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge. He is well-known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and whose Mountains of the Mind (2003) I have already reviewed in these pages.  The first describes the activity of walking from a scientific, physical, neurological and psychological point of view while the second is a literary and poetic investigation of what it means existentially or spiritually for the walker to follow paths, on land and on sea, bearing in mind that they have been well travelled by our ancestors.

The philosophers Rousseau and Nietzsche walked to think more clearly.  Nietzsche opined that “We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors — walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.”  Immanuel Kant famously took a daily walk at the same time, a routine so regular that people in his town, Königsberg, allegedly set their clocks to his appearance. This walk was a way for him to escape the "compulsion of thought" and a chance to think freely, allowing his mind to process ideas in a creative manner.  That philosophers and writers do their best thinking on foot was certainly nothing new in the field of philosophy as Aristotle's school, known as the Peripatetic school, was founded in the Lyceum, a gymnasium outside Athens, and named after the covered walkways (peripatoi) where Aristotle and his students walked and discussed philosophy.

Book 1: In Praise of Walking (The Bodley Head, London, 2019) by Shane O’Mara

 

O’Mara, given his expertise in brain research, argues that the ability and practice of walking is one of the great capacities, on a par with writing and other cultural activities, that set the human animal apart from other species.  His book is a compendium of astonishing scientific, neurological and psychological facts as well as a deep and comprehensive reflection on the sheer power and universal significance of the all-too-little-considered action of walking by the unthinking lay person.  There is much for the reader to learn from this book.  Walking makes our minds mobile in a way denied to other animals.  O’Mara quotes the neurologist Erwin Straus who stressed that our “upright posture is an indispensable condition of man’s self-preservation.” (Quoted p. 2) Unique among animals, we humans learned to walk with our spines perpendicular to the ground, allowing us great mobility and freedom to use our hands, all the while allowing our brains to enlarge and develop.  Again and again, O’Mara stresses that walking is a particularly important holistic function for our species as it improves our physical, mental and social capacities.  Early in the book he states that “walking makes us social, by freeing our hands for tools, and for gestures – movement that allows us to signal meaning to others” (p.4) I liked the author’s contention that we are not disembodied brains rattling around in the husk of a body travelling through space and time as Descartes would have had us believe.  Rather we are very much embodied creatures who learn through engaging bodily with the world, especially through walking.  As a neurologist and brain scientist, the author repeats his message throughout the book that walking, even standing itself, mobilises cognitive and neural resources that are not available to us when we are sitting or reclining. (See p. 10)

As a sixty-seven-year-old man, I take great inspiration from O’Mara’s succinct words: “You don’t get old until you stop walking, and you don’t stop walking because you are old.” (p. 11) Again it is reassuring to learn that hearing, sight and reaction times all improve during active movement. I also liked the fact that the author, while a scientist of note, is well-read in literature.  He quotes from one of my favourite poets in English, T.S. Eliot.  The lines O’Mara chooses are the opening ones of the poem “Prufrock” which are essentially an invitation by the poet to the reader to come walk with him as he wanders through the city.  In short, for the author, as for Eliot, “walking promises types of experiences denied other forms of transport, no matter how attractive they might be.” (p. 27)

This book is crammed with interesting scientific facts.  You probably did not know, like me, that extensor and flexor muscles are used for walking.  Or that the human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by virtue of the fact that our early ancestors had learned to walk to support life.  Or the superiority of bipedal over tetrapodal walking (but inferior in the activity of running).  Or again, the interesting fact, given that this reviewer is Irish, that the oldest tetrapod trackway in the world is on Valentia Island off the coast of Kerry.  Apparently, this trackway is 380 million years old.  Again, we learn the unusual fact that we are the best walkers of all species, but certainly not the best runners.  We leave that to the quadrupeds.  Furthermore, the traditional proverbs, which obviously go back hundreds of years in any particular culture, carry within them the seeds of knowledge and wisdom.  For example, the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.” (p. 42) Moreover, our hands evolved and developed once we had become upright and walked out to gather food and furthermore, because of our free mobile hands we learnt to build dwelling places for our families.

I had better stop enumerating interesting facts or else this post will have become far too long. O’Mara covers the mechanics of walking; how our brains determine in what direction we should walk by using the process of dead reckoning, that is a reckoning based on our direction of movement from some fixed and known point; how to walk through a city space; how to plan a town or city by making it comfortably walkable; and two stimulating chapters on creative and social walking.  I learned from this book that if I wish to avoid getting lost, I had better clarify my cognitive maps which work best when they are regularly activated and aerated by walking.  A wonderful read for any walker.

Book 2: The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. (Penguin Books, 2013) by Professor Robert Macfarlane.

 

Macfarlane describes this work as "the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart," and that "loose" means it doesn't matter which order you read them in, or if you only read one. This is basically a book about walking and a deep reflection on that activity with several chapters about pathways through the sea.

Macfarlane traces in prose, which often reaches a rich and inspiring lyricism, his experience of physically following the old long-trodden traditional paths mostly around his native United Kingdom and a few places outside its confines like Palestine and Spain.  The author's opening sentence is a key to this book - “Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk…. We are track makers.” (p. 13).  From there we are invited by the author to follow him on the many traditional tracks and pathways he has lovingly walked and explored over the years.  Once again, we are accompanied along those paths by his favourite poets and literary friends by way of inspiration: Walt Whitman, Wordsworth and other Romantics, John Clare, Hilaire Belloc and many more besides.  However, his main inspiration for the book, he tells us, was the poet Edward Thomas, “both a walker and a writer,” who loved following pathways and who wrote a series of travelogues.  With Thomas as “guiding spirit,” Macfarlane sets out on his pilgrimage of following many traditional paths and we readers follow him imaginatively. (See p. 24).  There is, as in all books by Macfarlane, a philosophical, indeed a spiritual, depth. Each chapter, describing a specific pathway, has a natural object as title: Chalk (Icknield Way), Silt (the Broomway) and so on and even two chapters (Water-South; Water-North) on sea pathways through the islands in the north of Scotland.  I will leave it to the readers to discover the other natural or elemental titles and paths for themselves.  

This book celebrates so much more than physical travelling.  It leads the reader on a personal journey of self-discovery, indeed on a pilgrimage into a multilayered landscape of geology, topology and anthropology and tells us more about how the land and its pathways have shaped us humans and how we have shaped them ever so little in return.

Given the current geopolitical situation, it is interesting to note that Macfarlane recounts in the tenth chapter a walk he took with his Palestinian friend Raja Shehandeh in Palestine, namely around Ramallah on the West Bank.  He mentions the fact that many of the traditional pathways had been restricted since the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967 and that his walking-friend Raja had found it ever more difficult to find traditional paths near his home that weren’t cut across by a settler’s bypass road.   Bearing in mind that the year of publication of this book was 2012/2013 and that his walk there had occurred shortly before that, one wonders about the extent of the diminution of access to such traditional paths since.  Interestingly, for an Irish reader like me, I was intrigued to learn that the Arabic word “sarha” that describes the wandering one would make about these traditional pathways originally meant to let cattle out to pasture early in the morning, allowing them to wander freely.  Similarly, in the Irish language the etymology of the word for road, viz., “bóthar,” is a combination of two words which translate as the room for cows to pass, thereby encapsulating the centrality of such paths to the culture and agriculture of our island.     

All in all, this book is a magnificent meditation on walking and how reflective walking stimulates the imagination on many levels.  Edward Thomas had written that there are certain kinds of knowledge which exceed mere propositions and which can only be sensed.  Indeed, Wittgenstein famously declared as regards philosophical musing: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" in a similar vein.  This reviewer gets the feeling that Macfarlane’s lyrical prose at times comes close to describing the indescribable, challenging to some extent at least the contentions of both Thomas and Wittgenstein.