Feet on the Ground

Here I am, a writer and a walker too of some regularity, yet I simply had no notion of what a long history there is connecting the two. Only reading an essay entitled “The Unbearable Smugness of Walking” in the Atlantic has made me realize I’m not a mere writer and walker. I am… a “writer-walker,” and an heir, apparently, to a long tradition of the sort.

In the essay, Toronto-based writer Michael LaPointe reviews a recent work, Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking, which “gathers 36 testimonies to walking’s invigorating literary power in particular. Writers from Petrarch to Franz Kafka to Will Self have recorded their enthusiasm for, in [author Duncan] Minshull’s words, ‘ambling, rambling, tramping, trekking, stomping and striding.’ Higher-quality endorsements of the creative value of walking than these would be hard to find.”

The idea that walking can enrich one’s writing harks back, according to Minshull, at least to the Romantic period, when writers owed much of the inspiration for their “sublime visions of the natural world” to roaming about in the great outdoors. The essayist William Hazlitt, for example, enthused over Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s talent for “converting a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric ode.”

Later writers exchanged the countryside for grimy, crowded city scenes that afforded a very different kind of inspiration, but “the Romantic conception of walking as the essential literary act persisted… walk, observe, write.” And not only urban sights and sounds, but smells too. Edward Hoagland’s reminiscences of New York, LaPointe writes, recall how he “stalked the streets of his hometown, first ‘to smell the yeasty redolence of the Nabisco factory’ and then ‘to West Twelfth Street to sniff the police stables.’ The author was inhaling the raw stuff that would fuel creativity: ‘I knew that every mile I walked, the better writer I’d be.’ ”