As a certified "mad walker" who sets a goal of 1,250 miles per year (5,000 miles every four years), indulging occasionally in insensate literary projects, we appreciated Joyce Carol Oates' essay "Running and Writing" in Great Writers on the Art of Fiction (ed. James Daley, Dover Books 2007), pp. 153 - 158. To wit:
"A good run ... is (akin) to a good dream ... as musicians experience the uncanny phenomenon of tissue memory in their fingertips, so runner(s) feel ... extensions of an imagining self.
"Writers and poets (famously) love to be in motion ... English Romantic Poets were inspired by long walks in all weathers: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District, Shelley in Italy ("I walk until I am stopped, but I never am stopped"). New England Transcendentalists, most notably Henry Thoreau, were ceaseless walkers. Thoreau acknowledged that if he spent less than four hours a day outdoors "in motion," he needed almost "to atone for sin."
Like Samuel Johnson before him, who ranged London at all hours, Charles Dickens in his middle years suffered an insomnia "that propelled him onto the London streets at night." His haunting essay Night Walks hints that this terrible "night restlessness" revealed a soul-in-passage, compelled to press on "through darkness and pattering rain." Walt Whitman "tramped impressive distances ... we feel the walker's pulse-beat in his breathless, incantatory poems." Henry James (of all people) "loved to walk for miles in London."
"Stories come to us as wraiths, embodying a vision," writes Joyce Carol Oates. "Outdoor movement amounts to meditation ... (as if) waking dreams keep us from actual madness." St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430) was notorious for perambulating night and day. An entire philosophical school, the Peripatetics, marched up and down their 100-yard long colonnaded Stoa engaged for hours in speculations purposely divorced from inkpots and scrolls.
As large, hairless, bipedal primates, humans inherit a compulsive kinetic tendency-- nature designs us to range in long, loping strides across primordial grasslands, savannahs, spreading veldts. From earliest times human minds have focused of necessity on end-points, covering intervening distances in easy, fluid steps. Awake and aware yet strangely disembodied, our streams-of-consciousness bear onwards to far-distant goals. Like floating or flying, this sense of sweeping forward relegates doubts and fears to an imaginary realm where dangers pose no obstacle, however real.
Serious walkers accept their fate neither as an accident nor by design, but rather as a discipline imposed by that most rigid of all task-masters-- themselves. Walking surfaces unbidden; like flotsam washed ashore, by meditative wind-and-tide it's something you just do. "The greatest poverty is not to live in the natural world"... and we recall in 1996 noticing a small, skyward patch of light which turned out to be a "long period" comet called Hale-Bopp in 150,000-year hyperbolic orbit on the Sun. Hale-Bopp shone briefly opposite Earth across our entire solar system, and will re-appear in due course after 75,000 years.
We could do without Hale-Bopp, but we cannot do without the vision such a body represents. Here is a phenomenon so remote in Space and Time, yet real, that contemplative steps become imperative. Eventually we all will take a final step, beyond which lies another road. Meantime, pursue your Journey looking skyward, for that way lies the stars.
"A good run ... is (akin) to a good dream ... as musicians experience the uncanny phenomenon of tissue memory in their fingertips, so runner(s) feel ... extensions of an imagining self.
"Writers and poets (famously) love to be in motion ... English Romantic Poets were inspired by long walks in all weathers: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District, Shelley in Italy ("I walk until I am stopped, but I never am stopped"). New England Transcendentalists, most notably Henry Thoreau, were ceaseless walkers. Thoreau acknowledged that if he spent less than four hours a day outdoors "in motion," he needed almost "to atone for sin."
Like Samuel Johnson before him, who ranged London at all hours, Charles Dickens in his middle years suffered an insomnia "that propelled him onto the London streets at night." His haunting essay Night Walks hints that this terrible "night restlessness" revealed a soul-in-passage, compelled to press on "through darkness and pattering rain." Walt Whitman "tramped impressive distances ... we feel the walker's pulse-beat in his breathless, incantatory poems." Henry James (of all people) "loved to walk for miles in London."
"Stories come to us as wraiths, embodying a vision," writes Joyce Carol Oates. "Outdoor movement amounts to meditation ... (as if) waking dreams keep us from actual madness." St. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 - 430) was notorious for perambulating night and day. An entire philosophical school, the Peripatetics, marched up and down their 100-yard long colonnaded Stoa engaged for hours in speculations purposely divorced from inkpots and scrolls.
As large, hairless, bipedal primates, humans inherit a compulsive kinetic tendency-- nature designs us to range in long, loping strides across primordial grasslands, savannahs, spreading veldts. From earliest times human minds have focused of necessity on end-points, covering intervening distances in easy, fluid steps. Awake and aware yet strangely disembodied, our streams-of-consciousness bear onwards to far-distant goals. Like floating or flying, this sense of sweeping forward relegates doubts and fears to an imaginary realm where dangers pose no obstacle, however real.
Serious walkers accept their fate neither as an accident nor by design, but rather as a discipline imposed by that most rigid of all task-masters-- themselves. Walking surfaces unbidden; like flotsam washed ashore, by meditative wind-and-tide it's something you just do. "The greatest poverty is not to live in the natural world"... and we recall in 1996 noticing a small, skyward patch of light which turned out to be a "long period" comet called Hale-Bopp in 150,000-year hyperbolic orbit on the Sun. Hale-Bopp shone briefly opposite Earth across our entire solar system, and will re-appear in due course after 75,000 years.
We could do without Hale-Bopp, but we cannot do without the vision such a body represents. Here is a phenomenon so remote in Space and Time, yet real, that contemplative steps become imperative. Eventually we all will take a final step, beyond which lies another road. Meantime, pursue your Journey looking skyward, for that way lies the stars.
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