The Tao of Travel

ON HIS DEATHBED, "Bruce summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers," Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in his biography Bruce Chatwin. "When they first met in Melbourne in 1984 ... their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. 'He had an almost immediate rapport with me,' says Herzog, 'when I explained to him that tourism is a mortal sin, but walking on foot is a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilization something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.'"

Herzog's belief in solvitur ambulando is unshakable. In an interview he said, "I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing."

And he walked the walk. In 1974, hearing that the German film director Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, Herzog decided to walk the five hundred miles there from Munich, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot." He added, as passionate walkers often do, "Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself." He was thirty-two. It was the winter of 1974. He described the journey in Of Walking in Ice

(1980).

Herzog traveled almost as a mendicant. He rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to break into unoccupied houses and sleep in them, or sneak into barns and sleep in haystacks. He was frequently taken to be a tramp or an outlaw—he was indeed a trespasser, but that too is often the role of a walker. He was sent away from inns and restaurants for his sinister appearance.

His route was as the crow flies ("a direct imaginary line"), taking him through cities and slums and garbage dumps and past motorways; this is anything but pastoral, and yet his mood is reflective. His prose is cinematic, composed ofheaped-up images, like a long panning shot of a young man trudging through snow and rain, across bleak landscapes, never making a friend, never ingratiating himself. His legs ache, his feet are so blistered and sore he limps. He writes, "Why is walking so full of woe?"

He records his dreams, he recalls his past, his childhood, and his prose becomes more and more hallucinatory. Nearer Paris, where he will find that Lotte Eisner has not died, he is strengthened by the sight of a rainbow: "A rainbow before me all at once fills me with the greatest confidence. What a sign it is, over and in front of he who walks. Everyone should Walk."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

THE TITLE SAYS everything of this posthumous book. Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire

is the last thing Rousseau wrote; he worked on it until a few weeks before he died, in 1778. The word "walk" is a specific activity in the book, but it also implies an essay, the word Montaigne used to mean a try, or an attempt.

"I am now alone on earth," Rousseau writes in the first line of the "First Walk," and announces that this sequence of walks will take the form of self-examination. Detached from everything and everyone for fifteen years (because of exile, condemnation, and harassment), utterly alone, he asks, "What am I?"

His serene condition, which he calls renunciation, is like that of the mendicant saddhu who wanders in India. "Everything is finished for me on earth. People can no longer do good or evil to me here. I have nothing more to hope for or to fear in this world; and here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but unperturbed, like God himself."

Through walking, Rousseau remembers events, interprets his actions, and recalls embarrassments—a key one in the "Fourth Walk" when, asked about his children, he claims he doesn't have any. It is, as he writes, a lie. Rousseau had five children, who, for their own good (so he claimed in his Confessions

and here too), he stuck in a foundling home. But this memory provokes a reverie about being untruthful.

His meditation on happiness in the "Fifth Walk" produces one of the many bittersweet reflections on the transitory nature of joy: "Happiness [is] a fleeting state which leaves our heart still worried and empty."

In later walks he speaks of how a country ramble can be spoiled or overpowered by certain conditions, how "memory of the company I had left followed me into solitude," and how particular itineraries had put him into contact with people he found upsetting. A tone of resignation permeates the Reveries. Rousseau was through trying to persuade anyone that he was worthy. Intensely autobiographical, it is a set of excursions that become reflections on life and death, for a man who is about to die.

Wordsworth: A Nature Poet with "Serviceable Legs"