Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in
Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I
cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
Scotland clearly relishes its twin legacy of brains and long-
striding. On the wall of the National Museum of Scotland hangs a
quote from James Watt, inventor of the steam engine (yes, the steam
engine) in 1765: “It was in the Green of Glasgow . . . when the idea
came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush
into a vacuum. . . . I had not walked further than the Golf-house when
the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” Nikola Tesla, too,
invented a revolutionary engine while on a long walk in a Budapest
park. Little did these men know how transport engines would hasten
the demise of pedestrian life.
Anticipating the exercise/nature debate, Thoreau opined, “. . . the
walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise . . .
but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” He also wrote, in
his essay “Walking,” “I think that I cannot preserve my health and
spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly
more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and
fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”
Walt Whitman was an even stronger evangelist on the topic,
exhorting men to be more perfect and more manly by striding around
outside. “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of
fortune, idler, the same advice,” he wrote. “Up! The world (perhaps
you now look upon it with pallid and disgusted eyes) is full of zest
and beauty for you, if you approach it in the right spirit! Out in the
morning!”
If for them nature provided mental clarity and adventure, for
Wordsworth it provided sanity itself. Nature, as he declared in
“Tintern Abbey,” was “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my
heart.”
It’s worth taking a short perambulation to the poet’s sensibility,