Walking is the same as thinking: although I’d like to believe this is true for everybody, it is especially true for millennials. We, the Uber-hailing Übermensch, have speed and efficiency hardwired into us. We know no other way to live. And because a stray second of stopping and staring makes us break out in existential hives, we run: run for our lives, run for our sanity. Every now and then, however, we come across a book or a movie that makes us reconsider our fight-or-flight instincts.

Bruce Chatwin was surely one of the most accomplished and prolific walkers of all time. As it so happened, he also wrote beautifully about walking. In his 1987 classic The Songlines , he charts the history of the Aboriginal people in Australia, connecting it to a tradition of nomadic walking. Chatwin’s prose is as audacious as his thesis: that migratory species tend to be less aggressive than sedentary ones, that the walk itself was the ‘show of strength’ that separated the survivors from the rest. The ‘songlines’ that have spread from Africa to the rest of the world are a reminder of our migratory past. These songlines are now preserved by the Aboriginals in Australia, the oldest surviving culture in the world.

Chatwin also believed that the nomadic existence provided nourishment for the soul. He wrote, “Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.”

It has been just two and a half years since the publication of Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways , but you would think it has been around for decades: such is the reverence accorded to this modern masterpiece of walking. Broadly speaking, the book is about a series of long walks in two areas; a harsh, challenging trail in Scotland and a relatively easier stroll in the northern part of the UK. Macfarlane delivers a masterclass in balancing experiential and literary knowledge. As a former geologist, I found his fixation with ‘preferred pathways’ adorable. These are the paths marked by rainwater as it seeps through limestone, attracting pedestrians, “all of whom etch the track of their passage with their feet as they go. In this way the path of a raindrop hundreds of thousands of years ago may determine the route of a modern-day walker.” There is something deeply poetic about this call-and-response mechanism between man and nature, and Macfarlane is the ideal guide to these philosophical implications of walking.

This year, I read two very interesting books about walking: a non-fiction that clinically dissected the intimate link between walking and thinking (Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust ), and a novel where the protagonist’s only answer to escalating personal and professional crises is to walk (Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed ).

Solnit’s magisterial essays in The New York Review of Books mark her as a writer of rare lucidity and insight. Wanderlust shares these qualities, along with an unerring eye for history’s tipping points: for instance, she correctly notes that walking as a source of pleasure for the Everyman is a relatively recent phenomenon. The idea of walking for pleasure began in 18th-century English gardens, the refuge of the sheltered and privileged aristocrat. Solnit also provides an elegant dissection of the writings of Walter Benjamin, Rousseau, Wordsworth and others who have propagated the idea of walking as a bottomless pit of creative energy.

Ferris shot to fame with his debut novel, Then We Came to the End , a book that takes its name from a Don DeLillo opening line and shared something of the veteran novelist’s hysterical scepticism about the American dream. His second novel, nowhere near as funny as his first, is a compelling, persistent beast nevertheless. His protagonist Tim Farnsworth is a successful trial attorney afflicted with the strangest of maladies: every now and then, he gets an irresistible urge to walk, ignoring everyone and everything in his life for days on end. Ferris acknowledges both the pleasures and the perils of obsessive walking. On the one hand, Tim becomes, to borrow a Saul Bellow phrase, a ‘genius noticer’: he observes flora, discovers subcultures and memorises the details of idiosyncratic road signs. On the other hand, when his ailment gets really serious, he shows symptoms consistent with schizophrenia, inventing an alternate walker persona, a feared alter-ego.

However, the Ferris brand of brutal satire is not for the faint-hearted. If you are looking for an honest, intelligent, well-written reminder of walking’s redemptive potential, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild is the book for you. After her mother’s death and the swift unravelling of her marriage, Strayed decides to go on a 1,100-mile trek — the Pacific Crest Trail. But she does not run or hide. Instead, she walks: walks with her disappointment, grief and loneliness and tries to reconcile herself with the choices that she made.

“If I had a map of those four-plus years to illustrate the time between the day of my mother’s death and the day I began my hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, the map would be a confusion of lines in all directions, like a crackling Fourth of July sparkler with Minnesota at its inevitable center. To Texas and back. To New York City and back. To New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada and California and Oregon and back. (...) The map would illuminate all the places I ran to, but not all the ways I tried to stay.” It is unsurprising, therefore, that our roster of great films about walking begins with Jean-Marc Vallée’s adaptation of Wild (2014), starring Reese Witherspoon as Strayed. Wild the film excels in just about every department. Novelist Nick Hornby delivers a taut screenplay that squeezes the essence out of the book. Laura Dern turns in a marvellous cameo as Strayed’s mother: she is as electric a performer today as she was nearly 30 years ago in Blue Velvet . And Witherspoon, who was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, must count herself particularly unlucky not to get the nod eventually: she would have become the first woman in the modern era to win twice.

Vienna is a city so beautiful that it spurred artistic ambitions in a young Adolf Hitler. To walk around Vienna all night with a beautiful stranger: one really doesn’t need more than that for a great story.

And so, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) doesn’t try to give you more. For an hour and a half, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) walk and talk. And all the while, you are not only unable to notice the absence of a plot, you find it impossible to take your eyes off them. Before Sunrise boasts that rapidly dwindling entity: intelligent, witty and memorable dialogue. At the end of the film, you will find yourself itching to roam the city at night, on the off-chance that you run into a starry-eyed stranger.

While a memorable walk can change your ideas about romance forever, it also has the potential to aid spiritual awakening. The Way (2011), directed by Emilio Estevez and starring his father, Martin Sheen, is about one such epic walk: the ‘Camino de Santiago’, a traditional Catholic pilgrimage to the shrine of St James in Galicia, Spain. In the movie, ophthalmologist Thomas Avery (Sheen) decides to take the pilgrimage after his son dies in a storm along the same route. Along the way, he meets several fellow-pilgrims, who are on the road for very different reasons.

Sheen channelises the gravitas of his role as President Jed Bartlett from The West Wing , and adds a compelling vulnerability to proceedings here. The film is slow-burning and has somewhat predictable lines here and there, but Sheen’s reassuring screen presence and competent supporting acts by Deborah Kara Unger and James Nesbitt keep the pot boiling.

The last film on this list proves that a journey with a pet is often preferable to one with two-legged companions. Harry and Tonto (1974) is about Harry Coombes (Art Carney), a recently evicted elderly widower who decides to travel across the country with his pet cat Tonto. It’s not all walking here: there are bus and car rides along the way, but Carney and Tonto make quite the walking pair, each dealing with the ravages of old age in his own way. The film also features the ever-dependable Ellen Burstyn as Coombes’ daughter, a bookstore owner in Chicago. Carney hits it out of the ballpark with his performance as Coombes. In fact, he went on to beat Jack Nicholson ( Chinatown ) and Al Pacino ( The Godfather Part II ) to win the 1974 Academy Award for Best Actor.

Be warned, though: reading these books and watching these films may cause your feet to take on a life of their own. Before you realise the true nature of your compulsion, you’ll be tying your shoelaces in double knots. I believe it was Ellen DeGeneres who once said: “My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.” 

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