A Philosophy of Walking (17 page)

Serenity comes from simply following the path. And then, while walking, serenity comes because all the hassles and dramas, all the things that gouge empty furrows in our lives and our bodies, becomes as if absolutely suspended, because out of range, too remote and incalculable. The wearisome grand passions and distasteful excitements of active lives, stressed to breaking point, are supplanted in the end by the implacable lassitude of walking: just walking. Serenity is the immense sweetness of no longer expecting anything, just walking, just moving on.

Melancholy Wandering – Nerval
 

T
here is a lot of walking in Gérard de Nerval. People tramping along, remembering, imagining, singing a ‘traditional song of the region' as they go:

Between long sessions in libraries – busy finding rare manuscripts, tracing improbable genealogies and filling in historical lacunae – and long hours of writing (‘those undoable books' as Dumas called them) or simple copying, between visits to his few friends and evenings at the theatre
lusting after The One (the actress Jenny C. for whom he had an unrequited passion), there was time for walks and wanders.

I don't want to mention here the journeys in Germany, England, Italy, Holland or further afield in the Middle East (Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Constantinople), but rather those walks through the streets of Paris, when he would come down from Montmartre and lose himself in the alleys around Les Halles; or again those long promenades in the forests at Ermenonville or Mortefontaine, in the woods at Pont-Armé, Saint-Laurent, or again the banks of the Aisne or the Thève (and always finishing at the tomb, ‘antique and simple' in form, of Jean-Jacques, on the Isle of Poplars). Nerval's is a landscape of castles and battlemented towers, red swaying masses of thicket on the green of valleys, orange gilding of sunsets. Trees, and more trees. Landscapes flat as slumber. Bluish morning mists making ghosts rise everywhere. October evenings made of old gold. You walk there as if in a dream, slowly, without effort (little steep or broken terrain). The rustle of dead leaves.

There's a feeling of melancholy in Nerval's attitude to walking. The melancholy of names and memories (present in
Les Filles du Feu
and in the
Promenades
). When walking, you end by reaching a hamlet. Crossing woodlands enveloped in fog, you come to the village bathed in autumn light. You'd been dreaming its name for ages: Cuffy, Châalis, Loisy, Othis … The gentleness of melancholy: in a light that is always vague and unsteady, walking with Nerval cradles the mind, all tossed about by renascent memories. And through
that, through those gentle, easy walks, the long sorrows of childhood are recalled. You only remember your dreams when walking.

That sort of walking, in those shivering forests, in a light changing from blue in the morning to orange in the evening, with nothing lively or trenchant to be seen, doesn't soothe sadness. It doesn't constitute its bracing remedy, its energy resource. It doesn't erase sadness, it transforms it. This is an alchemy that children know and practise: you walk as if you were letting yourself float in water, to dilute the sorrow and drown yourself in it. Let your sadness sail away in the free air; let yourself go. A dreamy walking, in which Nerval rediscovered the solitary stroller. Like Nietzsche (who always made you
climb
), at the pinnacle not of his destiny, but of his childish dreams.

‘Hi-ho, a horseman, ho / Riding home from Flanders, oh.' Old songs murmuring on the lips. Walking all day long in autumn, under a timid sun, leads to a blurring of times. Among these low hillocks the years are scattered, piled up, confused with each other. And always the same rustling, the same soughing wind, the same weak daylight. Childhood was the day before yesterday; yesterday, just now, this minute, maintaining that infinitely diluted sorrow along the dark, cool forest paths. Nerval has this quality of dreamy melancholy: slow rambles awakening ghosts from earlier times, kindly women's faces. And the certainty, when walking, of a childhood spent only and always in this light. Not nostalgia for lost years, nor nostalgia for childhood, but childhood itself as nostalgia (only children know
the miracle of
nostalgia without a past
). While walking there, slowly, in those Valois landscapes.

Otherwise there was the melancholia of
Aurélia
: active, sombre, given to
idées fixes
, to the completion of time. No longer the sympathetic, grave, languorous, autumnal strolling, but the fevered march of a quest, of destiny, the imminence of the end of time. From the summer of 1854, after leaving Dr Blanche's clinic (the doctor did not consider him cured), Nerval never stopped walking. He had a room in a wayside hotel, but only to sleep, not for long, when his exhausted body demanded rest. He walked and walked, would stop at a café, drink, and move on. He would stop at a reading-room or library, then visit a friend, then continue walking. Not flight, but a fixed insistence on confirming what is foreseen.

Walking had become part of an active melancholia. In
Aurélia
there is an image of walking that shows the signs everywhere. The anxious exaltation of the mad walker in towns. The streets are an excellent environment for maintaining, nourishing and deepening the illness. Everywhere sly glances, strange jerky movements, contradictory noises: engine sounds, bells, snatches of speech, the drumming of thousands of feet on the pavements. And as a route has to be found somehow, everything becomes a struggle and delirium is completed.

I am thinking of the last day, 25 January 1855: the final wander, which ended for Nerval in the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne where he found a window grille from which to hang himself. Not really a ‘wander', on second thoughts,
for he was pursuing a fixed, urgent idea. He had
Aurélia
in his legs. And whatever it is that makes a man follow a beckoning star.

When we examine his moments of intensity – deep despair or sudden euphoria, little to choose between them – we find a constant temptation to walk: must go out, must leave, must go and follow. You walk hurriedly, with the impression that people are everywhere staring at you, surrounding you, denouncing you, but you have to keep moving despite, against, the crowds with you and against you. Walking, as a continued decision of the illness, a lofty conquest of solitude. And you see that here everything scintillates, signals, calls out. Nerval saw a star growing bigger, the moon multiplying. Walking made his illness flower. It completed the madness, because while walking everything becomes
logical
: your legs bear the weight, and you think, that's it, must go there, it's good down there. Others think we are wandering aimlessly, when really it's a matter of following the idea, the idea that pulls, that carries us forward. Words come to the lips; we talk as we walk. Everything is true. Walking is a part of active melancholia.

‘I was singing as I walked a mysterious anthem.' Melodies come back, confirming yet again. This walk no longer brings back gentle memories, rather it multiplies coincidences. A proliferation of signs: that's really it.

He found his way to that rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, very dark, unlighted, tiny, buried in back streets, hard to find. People ‘fell on' it by taking the rue de la Tuerie, which started from the place du Châtelet. They had to follow that
first alley until it narrowed. There it became a ‘narrow, slimy, sinister' staircase, leading downward to the rue de la Vieille-Lanterne – a minuscule corner of dark pavement. To go there at night was the very ‘idea of a descent into hell' (Dumas).

Did he die of the unbearable bitterness of restored lucidity, or of an extreme eruption of the illness, its consummation? Nerval was found hanged in the pale dawn (‘his hat still on his head', according to Dumas, inspired as always by others' misfortunes).

But do we know why we walk?

A Daily Outing – Kant
 

W
e know that Immanuel Kant's life was far from adventurous. It is hard to imagine a drearier existence. He was born in Königsberg and died there. He never travelled, never left his native town. His father made saddles and harnesses. His mother was very pious and loving. He never heard an insult uttered at home, but lost both parents at an early age. He studied, worked hard, became a tutor, then a lecturer, then a university professor. At the beginning of his first book is the statement: ‘I have traced a path which I will follow. When my advance begins, nothing will be able to stop it.'

Of medium height, with a large head and bright blue eyes, the right shoulder higher than the left, he had a
delicate constitution. He had gone blind in one eye. His behaviour was such a model of regularity that some called him ‘the Königsberg clock'. On teaching days, when he emerged from his house, people knew it was exactly eight o'clock. At ten to, he had put on his hat; at five to, he had picked up his stick; and at dead on eight he stepped out of his door. He said of his watch that it was the last possession he would part with.

Like Nietzsche – although with different emphases – he was concerned with only two things apart from reading and writing: the importance of his walk, and what he should eat. But their styles differed absolutely. Nietzsche was a great, indefatigable walker, whose hikes were long and sometimes steep; and he usually ate sparingly, like a hermit, always trying out diets, seeking what would least upset his delicate stomach.

Kant by contrast had a good appetite, drank heartily, although not to excess, and spent long hours at the table. But he looked after himself during his daily walk which was always very brief, a bit perfunctory. He couldn't bear to perspire. So in summer he would walk very slowly, and stop in the shade when he began to overheat.

Of neither can it be said that his health was perfect. We should note – without seeing it as physiologically symbolic of their respective philosophies – that Kant was constipated, while Nietzsche suffered from compulsive vomiting. Of fragile temperament, Kant liked to think that he owed his longevity (he lived to be eighty) to his inflexible lifestyle. He held his good health to be a personal achievement,
the product of his iron self-discipline. He was passionately interested in dietetic medicine, which (he said) was an art not for enjoying life but prolonging it.

In his final years, however, he claimed that an airborne electrical fluid had ruined his health, a current he also claimed had caused the death of an improbable number of cats in Basle at about the same time. He never had any debts, and said so very loudly to anyone who would listen. He couldn't bear untidiness. Things always had to be in their place. All change was unbearable to him.

A student who regularly attended his lectures had always had a button missing from his jacket. One day he turned up with a new button, which bothered the professor terribly: he could not prevent his gaze from straying back to the new button on the youngster's coat. Legend has it that Kant asked the student to remove the new button, adding that it is more important to learn a thing than it is to know, after learning it, where to classify it. He always dressed in the same way. He displayed no caprice or oddity.

His life was as exactly ruled as music manuscript paper. He was awoken each morning at five o'clock, never later. He breakfasted on a couple of bowls of tea, then smoked a pipe, the only one of the day. On teaching days, he would go out in the morning to give his lecture, then resume his dressing-gown and slippers to work and write until precisely a quarter to one. At that point he would dress again to receive, with enjoyment, a small group of friends to discuss science, philosophy and the weather.