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Arthur Sidgwick
Walking essays
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664589538
Table of Contents
III WALKING AND MUSIC With a Digression on Dancing
III WALKING AND MUSIC WITH A DIGRESSION ON DANCING
IV WALKING, SPORT AND ATHLETICS
IV WALKING, SPORT AND ATHLETICS
NOTE A On the Rates of Walking of Various Persons in the Egoist, Chapters 25 sqq.
VIII WALKING ALONE With a Digression on London Walking
VIII WALKING ALONE WITH A DIGRESSION ON LONDON WALKING
I
WALKING AND CONVERSATION
‘The heavenly bodies is philosophy, and the earthly bodies is philosophy. If there’s a screw loose in a heavenly body, that’s philosophy; and if there’s a screw loose in an earthly body, that’s philosophy too; or it may be that sometimes there’s a little metaphysics in it, but that’s not often. Philosophy’s the chap for me.’
I
WALKING AND CONVERSATION
About the year 1887 there was still in existence a nursery joke:—
‘King Charles walked and talked;
Half an hour after his head was cut off.’
This, pronounced as a consecutive sentence, gave the infant mind its first experience of paradox. At the time we thought it funny. Later on, in the last decade of Victorianism, when we were struggling with ‘post,’ ‘postquam,’ and ‘postea,’ the joke appeared less funny. But later still, in Edwardian times, a deep moral meaning began (as was customary in those times) to appear underlying the joke. Take the two sentences as they stand above: construe ‘walk’ and ‘talk’ in their strict sense: generalise King Charles: convert the ‘post hoc’ into a ‘propter hoc’; and you will have a motto to which all good walkers will add ‘ὣς ἀπόλοιτο. …’
I do not mean, of course, that any or all forms of walking and talking are incompatible. It is possible, simultaneously, to stroll and to babble, to stroll and to talk, to walk and to babble. Strolling, the mere reflex action of the legs, is compatible with that sustained and coherent activity of the mind which alone deserves the name of talking. Babbling, the corresponding reflex action of the mind, is equally compatible with that supreme activity of the whole being which men call walking. But the attempt so often made to combine real walking with real talking is disastrous. Better the man who babbles and strolls, who trails his feet across country and his tongue across commonplace, than the man who tries to ventilate fundamental things while his body is braced to the conquest of road and hill.
‘A Voice’ at this point says ‘Yes, but we are not all scorchers,’ and thereby makes manifest a very common delusion. The Voice, and the body of opinion which it represents, are convinced that the difference between strolling and walking consists in the merely material point of speed, and that walkers cannot talk because they are bent solely on record-breaking, and have one eye ever on the milestones and one on the stop-watch, and no attention to spare for anything else. This is a gross and palpable error. Record-breaking is, of course, a possible form of walking, and most of us have indulged in it at one time or another; it is interesting, and sometimes even salutary, to abandon all higher thoughts, and go for a record frankly and whole-heartedly. But to the true walker this is only an occasional indulgence. Record-breaking is ultimately a degrading and (literally) a brutalising pursuit. It is the mere pitting of the brute animal powers against the brute inanimate conditions of time and space. If we are to be men and not animals, walking must be something more than a mere swing of the legs, and the country something more than a colourless aliquantum of miles. Record-breaking, if it becomes a habit, will be as a blight in the fair garden of walking, as a sarrusophone in the pedestrian symphony.
A casual observation of true walkers no doubt lends some colour to the Voice’s delusion. Walkers have generally an air of being intent upon the business in hand: they do not (as explained below) talk much: and as a mere matter of fact they generally walk at a good round pace. But their pace is only accidental and subordinate to their main purpose. The full swing of the legs, like all physical activities, is a fine thing in itself, but it is merely physical. The great fact is that such an activity leads more directly than others to that sense of intimacy with air and sun and hills and green things, which is the walker’s ideal. This sense of intimacy is not to be won by strolling; a man must do his best with his body before the gates are opened to him.
Another Voice may here interject ‘Wordsworth’; but, with all reverence and respect, I doubt if that great man ever was really an intimate of his surroundings in the sense which I mean. With him it was a mystical communion rather than an intimacy. He loved the country with a kind of austere and detached benevolence; I doubt if he really felt its idiosyncrasies like a friend. In his altitudes of thought there was probably little perceptible difference when he climbed Loughrigg after tea and when he took a whole day over the Langdale Pikes and Serjeant Man (if he ever did). Like the God of Aristotle, he experienced a single and continuous