Wanderlust: a History of Walking
“PEDESTRIAN ARCHITECTUREJean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in his Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning. That history began with the walks of various characters in the eighteenth century, ...but the more literary among them strove to consecrate walking by tracing it to Greece, whose practices were so happily revered and misrepresented then. The eccentric English revolutionary and writer John Thelwall wrote a massive, turgid book, The Peripatetic, uniting Rousseauian romanticism with this spurious classical tradition. “In one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages: I pursue my meditations on foot,” he remarked. And after Thelwall’s book appeared in 1793, many more would make the claim until it became an established idea that the ancients walked to think, so much so that the very picture seems part of cultural history: austerely draped men speaking gravely as they pace through a dry Mediterranean landscape punctuated with the occasional marble column.This belief arose from a coincidence of architecture and language.MoreLess
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