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Incidental Inventions

(From an interview on June 8th, 2015, at: https://www.europaeditions.com/review/2104)

Interviewer: “You’ve mentioned disappearance—it’s one of your recurring themes.

Elena Ferrante:  “It’s a feeling I know well. I think all women know it. Whenever a part of you emerges that’s not consistent with some feminine ideal, it makes everyone nervous, and you’re supposed to get rid of it in a hurry. Or… if you refuse to be subjugated, violence enters in. Violence has, at least in Italian, a meaningful language of its own—smash your face, bash your face in. You see? These are expressions that refer to the forced manipulation of identity, to its cancellation. Either you’ll be the way I say, or I’ll change you by beating you till I kill you.”

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I’ve recently been reading two non-fiction books I bought some time ago, War and Children, written in 1943 by psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, which focuses on how war affects the development of children, and who assert that “development demands its own conditions, irrespective of war and peace or all other happenings in the outer world,” and Incidental Inventions, a collection of short pieces by Elena Ferrante. I wrote about both books simulataneously, thinking that I might post both pieces together, but decided to upload the text related to Ferrante, and save the article on Freud and Burlingham’s work for August.

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an Italian novelist / writer, who has been lauded as ‘one of the great novelist of our time,” and who has received several awards. However, despite her fame and success she has chosen to keep her identity hidden; wanting to remain totally private. Maintaining her anomymity possibly allows her to write about things she might not otherwise have had the courage to write about, and to preserve a space of creative freedom, enhancing her capacity to both create and publish on her own terms. She has stated that shyness is also one of the reasons behind her choice, and perhaps remaining anonymous also makes it easier for her to exist and work within her environment. However, although Ferrante shuns publicity, the mystery surrounding her identity and the speculation that has grown around it has probably also sparked more interest in her work. In written interviews (she avoids face to face interviews) she says that the readers can extract the author’s shape from the book and the text itself. In the interview mentioned above Ferrante noted that it seems to her that “the emptiness created by my [her] absence was filled by the writing itself.”

From her interviews and non-fiction works, it is known that Ferrante was born in Naples, is the daughter of a seamstress, and has lived outside Italy. She appears to have studied the classics and to have been married. She is a mother and grandmother. She has stated that in addition to writing, she studies, translates and teaches. Critics and readers of her work have deduced much more from her fictional heroines, but a lot of these conclusions might actually not be precise. Similarities between her characters and what is known about her life lead critics to consider her work autobiographical to a great extent or to suggest that the novelist in her Neapolitan novels, Elena Greco, is Ferrante’s avatar;. However, what can really be known from her fiction books are her words and sentences, and patterns of her mind and imagination. In the interview cited above, Ferrante refers to O’Rourke who wrote that “the reader’s relationship to a writer who chooses to separate herself, radically, from her own book “is like that which we have with a fictional character. We think we know her, but what we know are her sentences, the patterns of her mind, the path of her imagination.”

Incidental Inventions, which Ferrante describes as “brief trickles of ink,” consists of a collection of short pieces she wrote over a year (2018), for a weekly column in The Guardian. The book was first published in 2019, and is illustrated by Andrea Ucini.

Her subjects are diverse: first times and first love, climate change, enmity and competition among women, and people more genrally, friendship and the rarity of great friends, the process of adapting her novels for film and television, marriage, laughter, her past smoking addiction, fears, ellipses, motherhood and daughters, keeping a diary, the urgency of writing, how writing distances the writer from other aspects of life, the role of luck in an artists’ breakthrough, linguistic nationality, translation, her exercise in re-thinking male heroes in literature as female, anonymity and what can be discovered about an artist through their work alone, questions of feminism and art produced by women, the difficulty of women becoming themselves in a world made for men, the sense of feeling as not being enough, poetry and prose, the past I or me in a photograph, the weather and the seasons, exclamation marks, death, religion and the trembling of the three Marys, insomnia, the pleasure of learning, the politics of her country, Italy, and the danger to democracy, “as [the demagogue leader] bangs his xenophobic and racist fists on the table,” psychoanalysis and therapy and the power indifferences inherent within the analyst-client relationship, how the classification of human beings into winners and losers is both cruel and arbitrary because the conditions at the point of starting out are too unjust to think of as a competition in which the odds are not stacked, love of films and the screen versions of many actors and actresses, and how reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art, the desperation and the sense of loss that dominates Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, mobile phones, interviews, her love and fear of plants, stereotypes, writing for the screen, the age-old discussion of talent, the deluge of news nowadays, literary novelty, lies, change and clean breaks, and more.

A selection of a few interesting or wise points she makes in the book on a variety of topics:

About first times and first love she says that even though we attribute to them the power of the unrepeatable, ultimately they get swallowed up by all the times that have followed or by their transformation into habit. She notes that what we were at the beginning is only “a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.” In her piece on fear she points out that what perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people. On death she tells us that as time has gone by the idea of death itself seems increasingly pallid, and what is truly terrifying is the end of an enjoyable life, of a full life. In relation to the age old discussion of talent she notes that the poet (or artist) has to have not only the gift of talent, and the privilege and the culture of being able to nurture and refine it, but also luck.

Concerning fiction and non-fiction, she states that the dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture. On laughter and its power, she believes that no power has ever yielded an inch thanks to a laugh. “Ridicule, yes, annoys the powerful, but it doesn’t bury them. Yet for the moment we’re laughing, we feel their grip on our life relax a little. Laughter is a short, very short, sigh of relief.” In her enjoyable piece on the exclamation point Ferrante first tells us that she tries to express with restraint, tending towards self-mockery, and she admires those who maintain a calm demeanour during an argument. She then says that in a passage an exclamation should be understood by reading and there is no need to add it at the end, but nowadays writers are lavish with exclamation marks in text messages, in WhatsApp chats, and in emails. She finally adds: “At least in writing we should avoid acting like the fanatical world leaders who threaten, bargain, make deals, and then exult when they win, fortifying their speeches with the profile of a nuclear missile at the end of every wretched sentence.”

There’s also an interesting short essay titled Linguistic Nationality. She tells us that although she loves her country, simplified versions of national characteristics should be contested. She herself, for instance, digests pizza poorly and eats very little spaghetti, doesn’t speak in a loud voice, doesn’t gesticulate, and hates all mafias. Being Italian, for her, begins and ends with the fact that she speaks and writes in the Italian language, which like all languages is “a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought….” There’s also a piece dedicated to translation, in which she notes that “translators transport nations into other nations.” As for her past smoking addiction she comments that she discovered that she couldn’t let go of cigarettes, because she was afraid of seeing the world in all its sharp-edged clarity.

On art and anonymity Ferrante tells us that ever since adolescence, she liked the term “unknown,” which, she explains means that all we can know of the person who made a painting is the work we have before our eyes. She says that before her is simply the composition of a human being who summoned their inventive energy to create and that she can devote herself to the pure result of a creative gesture, without worrying about a big or small name. She also writes about how when writing she likes to dig into common situations and feelings, and she insists on expressing everything that we tend to be silent about. She’s interested in causing confusion, pushing herself to go beyond appearances, sweeping away the resistance of the ordinary and looking for words that will pull out at least a little of the extraordinary that is concealed in the ordinary.

On creative freedom she says that although a part of her would like the story in the film adaptation of her novel to adhere faithfully to her story, her less primitive and possessive self knows that there’s something much more important at stake than this instinct to protect her own inventions, because women writers (artists) are still assigned to the balcony…. She writes, “Another woman has found in that text good reason to test her creative capacities. Gyllenhaal has decided, that is, to give cinematic form not to my experience of the world but to hers….. In the great warehouse of the arts, set up mainly by men, women have for a relatively short time been seeking the means and opportunities to give a form of their own to what they have learned from life. So I don’t want to say: you have to stay inside the cage that I constructed.”

This collection of short essays also includes a piece on the bond between mothers and daughters. She notes “A secret cord that can’t be cut binds us to the bodies of our mothers: there is no way to detach ourselves, or at least I’ve never managed to. It’s impossible to go back inside her; it’s hard to move past her shadow.” Concerning the younger generations, she fears the generations who don’t proudly leave their parents behind, but also those who, at twenty, leave their parents behind to embrace the mores of grandparents and great-grandparents and desire to replace the world of today with “a golden age when everyone knew their place, that is, in an order based on sexist and racist hierarchies.” She goes on to tell us that she loves young people who fight to give their time a new form and demand a better life for the entire human race, and hopes that her daughters stay that way for a long time., and then as is in the natural order of things as they get older “they’ll find me within themselves, discovering physical details, flashes of personality, thoughts, and will learn to welcome me, make room for me. As happened with my mother and me, they’ll discover that, even admitting they’re partly me, they’ll continue to be themselves. In fact they’ll be themselves more fully, with greater autonomy.”

On the future of humanity she comments that it’s urgent that we humans learn to be self-critical and learn to confront the truth of ourselves, before we’re destroyed by our obstinate determination to become immortal. “The future that interests me,” Ferrante writes, “is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.” And elsewhere she asks: “Was it possible the animal man, that infinitesimal piece of nature, in the course of his brief history had managed to irreversibly damage all the rest?” As for the flood of news, fake and real, she notes  that for her “the problem is not, therefore, to stay well informed, but to track within the mass of pointlessly amplified news that which will help me to distinguish, over time, the true and the false, the best and the worst: this is an extremely difficult task.” She ponders why certain people seem to us so different that we can’t accept them, can’t recognise their humanity, and wonders whether a little goodwill could remove any reason for hostility. She concludes with thoughts about the issue of inequality, which she points out “generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far—or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors.”

To conclude, I felt that each short piece allows us to catch a glimpse of her inner world and life, and also provides insights into her outlook on life. Her writing here seems self-investigative, urgent and intimate, while also maintaining her anonymity. Ferrante notes that writing these weekly essays has been a permanent exposure of fragments of herself. It also informed by a feminist outlook. In one review of her work, one critic writes that her books are influenced by second wave feminism, particularly Italian feminists like Luisa Murano and writers like Helene Cixous, who has written that “women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away……….. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history…..” Ferrante calls this reclaiming of voice, female alientation-inclusion. She seems to be drawn to the ways that women operate and survive in a society dominated by men and their power. It is also useful to bear in mind that her stories are embedded in particular contexts and times. She writes about what surrounds her heroines, postwar Naples, for instance, how others and their voice permeate them, and what it means to absorb another’s voice.

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Writing on the Wall 

“You pick your way past young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living.” Italo Calvino

Today’s post is about graffitti and Madeleine Pelling’s book, Writing on the Wall. Pelling is a British cultural historian, writer, podcaster and contributor for TV and radio, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, who has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh and Manchester. With her book she transports us back in time, bringing to life the atmosphere of the spaces and historical events she discusses. Personally, reading the book felt a bit like watching a period film or reading extracts from a Charles Dickens’ book. Pelling has managed not only to narrate the history and evolution of graffitti, while situating it in the midst of historical events and architectural spaces, but also to bring to life the grim realities and atmosphere of the periods she is discussing. Finally, towards the end of the book she makes references to events concerning graffitti and contemporary political issues.

Pelling has gone in search mostly of the hidden voices of 18th century Britain, a turbulent and transformative historical period, and a time when anyone with a sharp pointed object or a piece of chalk or charcoal could leave their mark on walls, ceilings, windows, and public monuments. Through marks made by both the poor and the rich, by ordinary people and upper class citizens and parliamentary figures, we get to look into these otherwise invisible stories, and gain insight into a tumultuous time in British history through its graffitti. Pelling tells us that graffiti is one of hundreds of words used over the past few centuries to describe this type of messaging via words, symbols and images, a form of expression and messaging we can find across time from the Ancient Egyptians to the present. She discusses the importance of graffitti in revealing untold stories that would otherwise have been lost in time, and how this form of expression and communication allows us to get a glimpse of what life was like behind the scenes.

The book is organised in three parts, which include three different periods: (1688-1740), (1740-1780), and (1780-1800), focuses on both the content and sites of graffitti, and also includes illustrations, photographs and art work. She begins with William Hogarth’s series of engraved images, The Four Stages of Cruelty. As she describes a scene, at one point she writes: “Alongside this combative encounter between perceived high and low life, royal morality and plebeian baseness, a third man is writing on the wall….” She goes on to provide a brief socioeconomic critique commenting “The scene is cut through with criticism of the inequalities and brutalities Hogarth and his contemporaries witnessed all around them in the eighteenth century.” She poses questions like whether those born to a life of poverty and crime were destined to perpetuate it and what role did writing on the wall play in the debate between the grim realities faced at the time by so many of the nation’s poor with the ideas of Enlightenment that were emerging.

Pelling explains that as literacy increased among the population at large, and as a public sphere [defined by spaces like coffee houses, taverns, drinking venues, brothels, and powered by debate], began to emerge, writing on walls and other surfaces offered a relatively unpoliced and unrestricted way of making oneself heard. The messages on these surfaces had moved away from the religious and domestic settings they occupied in previous centuries to reflect the new more complex world, as towns and cities were rebuilt after the civil war, the plague, and in the case of London, the fire of the previous century, fed on the wealth of an expanding empire. Pelling writes that issues like the justice and penal systems, a variety of inequalities and issues of parliamentarian representation, as well as, the religious character of the nation or where the power of the monarch ended and that of Parliament began, were all debated, and this debate was reflected on walls and other surfaces. This material included anything from political slogans and drawings and sketches, to love letters, satirical poems, notes of displeasure, anger and hatred, resistance and financial ruin, libellous accusations, religious or prophetic warnings, and even reviews of sex workers* (I am a ware of the critique of this term by feminists, but this is the term used in the book).

Through reading the book we understand how leaving a mark, not only on the page, but also on the wall, could change lives, shift public opinion and feelings, and shape political events. This is made excessively clear as we read how political and religious conflict played out in graffiti across the country, as well as, on the battlefield, and how a simple chalk marking triggered events like the arrest and execution of an immigrant, Roman Catholic midwife, which had then contributed to a further deterioration in Catholic–Protestant relations, the dethroning of the Catholic King by William and Mary at the end of 1688, and all the events that followed.

One of Pelling’s sources is a published collection of graffitti found across London’s coffee houses, taverns, streets and privies, titled, The Merry-Thought; or, The Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, by an anonymous writer in 1731. This work would go on to become a best-seller, probably because the recorded messages resonated with the readers’ unarticulated commonalities, desires, secret thoughts, fears, losses, grievances and prejudices. Pelling notes that the writing on the walls of London served as a visible reminder of the tragic inequality that reigned.and the fragile balance of power. She writes: “London was a city with two faces: a respectable, polite and powdered veneer; and a seamier, pockmarked reality that festered beneath. These worlds did not exist in isolation, but rather side by side, sometimes in the same streets, houses and even rooms.” Meanwhile, in 1720, the collapse of the South Sea Company, which was originally set up to supply enslaved Africans to plantations in America, and which brought a lot of wealth, took place, with a catastrophic fallout, where fortunes were lost, and many went bankrupt.

Those who found their worlds shrunk to the size of a prison cell also left their marks on walls and surfaces. Pelling tells us prisons were microcosms of Georgian society, miniature, enclosed places with their own distinct cultures and economies, where state and subject collided. She writes that at the time the boundaries between social rank, power and morality regularly blurred, and poverty, debt, prejudice, ambition and greed or revenge, could throw “many Britons on the mercy of corruptible justice and penal systems tasked with maintaining order in a fast-changing society.” She adds that the risks of unfair treatment, miscarriages of justice and exploitation were high, the cells dank and squalid, disease was rife in the prisons, bribery proliferated, inmate treatment was subject to the whims and personalities of gaolers, people who had gone bankrupt or owed debts were packed in with convicts who had committed severe crimes, prisoners had few rights or access to healthcare, and were even used as medical guinea pigs. Entrepreneurial gaolers charged visiting fees so that the curious could peer into cells rendering inmates as “curiosities to be gawped at and characters to be reimagined in the minds of the masses.”

Additionally, many of the detained in prisons were on their way to transportation to the colonies, a practice that bolstered the colonial labour force by supplying able bodies to colonies in America and later in Australia. And they were probably some of the lucky ones, since at the time 200 crimes carried the death penalty! Prisoners carved their initials, names, poetry, prayers and confessions, the outlines of objects like guns and gallows, ships, buildings, and even elaborate streets, onto the surface of the prison walls. Pelling writes: “Graffiti was the language of the disenfranchised, and an invaluable means of asserting autonomy and resistance in a system that allowed for little preservation of self.” With a piece of coal or chalk, fire, blood or any sharp implement, inmates told their stories to assert themselves as victims or perpetrators, and their marks reveal a lot about how convicts saw themselves and the society that had denounced them. Today some of these marks have found their way into the works of contemporary artists who are trying to depict these spaces of incarceration blurring the lines between reality and fiction, high art and the perceived primitivism of this material.

In tracing the history of graffitti, the book allows us to visit significant events like the industrial revolution and the changes it brought, the Jacobite risings in Scotland and northern England, conflict with France and Spain, and revolution in the American colonies, Britain’s brush with civic uproar in June 1780 and the fear of a rebellion. Then in 1789 when violent insurrection engulfed Paris, emptying the Bastille of its prisoners and marking the symbolic start of the French Revolution, anxiety across the Channel reached new heights. Pelling writes that Britons would weaponise graffiti to fight their causes and that the role of graffiti cast a long shadow over the final decades of the eighteenth century. She notes that both writing on the wall and an emerging hieroglyphic vocabulary had proved “a formidable tool in the insurrectionist’s arsenal, articulating disenfranchisement, pointing out difference and directing crowds.”

Across the surfaces of Britain and its colonies, graffitti would help ask questions about the nature of freedom and who was and was not entitled to it. In the 18th century Britain’s rural poor, had turned from the fields into urban factories, where most lived in dire circumstances. This led workers’ unions to complain about the mechanisation of previously skilled and specialist work, and to advocate for basic rights and decent wages. Graffiti, once again, offered a relatively uncensored and anonymised mode of complaint against the commodification of human labour and the disappearance of craftsmanship and local community. Meanwhile, during the earliest years of Romanticism artists were exploring new ways of writing, painting and being, free from prior artistic and social convention, and as Pelling notes, mark making was fast becoming a shorthand for intellectual liberation.

Additionally, soldiers, on both sides of the English civil wars, also took to leaving their mark and the names of battles fought. For soldiers and sailors serving across the British Empire graffiti was a tool to mark their existence in a life fraught with dangers and without guarantee of survival. Pelling tells us that among the most prolific graffitists of Britain’s empire were its sailors; however, as new ideas around the value of freedom, dignity and human life emerged, and amidst the increasing calls for abolition of slavery, mark making was also practised by a wide range of individuals across the colonial world, including the oppressed and the enslaved.

Prisoners of war also took to filling up wall spaces. Pelling tells us that in 1815 approximately one-quarter of a million prisoners of war, mostly but not exclusively French, were held in Britain. Among these prisoners were displaced and enslaved men and women from the Carribean, who had been invited to fight in exchange for their freedom. Through the means of writing and drawing on the wall they showed their national and political loyalties from within the oppressive spaces of incarceration like castles, towers and ship gaols. Graffiti, writes Pelling, could track the progress of colonisation on land and sea and document its resistance, provide a remarkable record of human thought, feeling and fight for freedom.

A different set of prisoners in a different era, predominantly in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods, also left their mark on the wall, sometimes with more elaborate graffiti like those at the Tower of London, one of Britain’s most famous historic buildings and still in use as a tool of the state in the 18th century. Graffitti in codes and symbols of condemned queens, martyred servants and rebels were discovered in 1796 by John Brand, for whom, writes Pelling, “the graffiti of the doomed represented not only moments in political history – the courtly machinations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular – but also human anguish.” Also, at the time, the execution of the French roayal couple had spread panic among the British patricians, and Brand was aware of the volatile political situation and the fact that, as Pelling comments, crafting history was (and still is) a fraught and complicated business, and there were questions of authenticity and politics to consider because this material from the past could be used to unspool more than one narrative depending on who was telling it.

A story is also included in the book that demonstrates how intertwined personal and socioeconomic contexts are. She tells us the story of a highly respected in his trade ceramic painter, a generous and loved individual, James Doe, who committed suicide in 1979, after leaving a lengthy suicide letter, if one could call it that, which was customary at the time, not on paper but on the wall of the last place he resided. Pelling notes “Doe’s tale was one of ingenuity, art, industrial espionage, inequality and betrayal.” She discusses how a deep personal betrayal by a friend he had supported when imprisoned for industrial espionage, while risking his own reputation and savings, had ultimately lead to loss of his own reputation, employment and money, and how this reality was interconnected with the upheaval that the industrial revolution was causing, as mechanised production was rapidly erasing the human stories behind made things, as well as, traditional types of work, and how it was also leading to a decrease of food production, which in turn decreased the supply of food and led to hunger. Pelling comments: “the industrial boom was quickly creating a vast and hungry urban workforce supported by a dwindling rural population.”

The association between a message or marking on the wall and suicide in the book brought to my mind the principal and chemistry teacher of the Lyceum I attended, who on the first day of school during assembly and after the prayer was over, welcomed us with a “didactic story.” He pointed to a Nietzsche quote written high up on the wall of a building, taller than the walls of our school, and told us that the student who had written it had committed suicide, and the reason leading to this act was her reading Nietzsche. Of course, it was a lie because a teenage girl being able to write the phrase in such big print so high up would not have been practically possible, requiring a professional scaffolding, at least. But sadly this was his introductory advice to us, perhaps in attempt to erect an unconscious wall of fear to engaging with philosophy or developing critical thinking.

To conclude, according to Pelling, mark making of words, slogans, symbols and images on walls, windows, alleyways, churches, monuments, prisons, ships, rocks and trees, towers and castles, has served lots of purposes and has provided an outlet to emotions and creativity. She writes that graffitti, which had developed its own vocabularies and codes, challenged power and made the grievances, injustices, inequalities and complaints of the invisible visible, allowed Britain to converse and laugh with itself, question the status quo and react to events from the Jacobite risings to Romanticism, unite communities and tear them apart, and spread campaigns of hate and messages of love. It evolved from something everyday and unremarkable to a more effective political tool that was at various points perceived as evidence of criminality or condemned by authorities. It was also used as an act of self-memorialisation and a means to record micro-histories, moments in individual lives. It brought to the foreground the proximity between high art and graffiti, and the delineations of social class that lay therein, and it often became a record of pain, loss and suffering, of physical and creative labour, and a lasting means that has carried messages and memory to the present.

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Finally!…. managed to actually upload the new mildly edited version (July 1st, 2026)

Walking       

“You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.” Annie Dillard

“I take my soul / psyche for a walk // whenever its smile begins to harden. // It tells me I long for the rain, // the sun above the mountains or between the clouds and the wind born incessantly in the forests // full of aromas and substances, milk and music.” Nikiforos Vrettakos

“Walking in nature is the deepest prayer. Every step is a thank you to the sun and the soil.” Odysseas Elytis

Τoday’s post is about walking, this inherent human capacity to move on our two legs, famous walkers, and Frédéric Gros’s book, A Philosophy of Walking. It’s also accompanied by five related drawing-collages I prepared while reading and writing about walking.

 

 

 

 

Frédéric Gros, born in 1965, is a French professor of political philosophy at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, a former professor at the University of Paris XII, a lecturer at the National School of Judges, and at the prisons of Sante and Fresnes, an expert in the history of psychiatry and the violence of war, and the editor of the works of Michel Foucault. Gros is also an avid walker, and his book focuses on philosophers and literary figures that were avid walkers, as well as, his own experience and reflections on walking and trekking.

One reason I chose to read the book is because I myself like walking. I like walking for the health benefits it generates, and because I like being out in nature, for the sense of freedom it gives, for the opportunity it provides for observation of the world, because it’s a good way to take a break from whatever I’m doing and an easy form of exercise, and simply for the pleasure of not doing anything, other than walking under open skies. I try to walk several hours a week, and sometimes I walk longer distances, but I’m not a long-distance rambler or mountain climber, I don’t walk for whole days and I don’t walk in the wilderness or camp out alone at night in nature like the people discussed in the book, who walked consistently and intensely during their lives. Another reason I selected the book was that I found the exploration of the connection between walking and philosophy intriguing. Gros manages to weave philosophical ideas, biographical facts about historical figures and how their work was often interconnected with walking, and even dependent on it. Additionally, he includes his own experiences and reflections on walking both in rural and urban spaces, and combines a sociopolitical critique with beautiful descriptions of his encounters in nature. Each chapter begins with a related illustration.

Modern humans have walked the earth for about 300,000 thousand years, and our earlier human ancestors for billions of years. In some sense, our capacity to consistently walk upright has contributed to our evolution and defined our development trajectory as a species. I highlight species, because the fact that some people cannot walk due to health issues or disabilities, does not impact the evolutionary advantage of standing upright and walking. Across time thinkers and writers have been aware of the pleasure and the benefits of walking and climbing mountains and hills. Early Greek philosophers linked thinking to walking, and Aristotle founded the Peripatetic School [after the Greek verb περιπατείν, which means walking], a philosophical school founded in 335 BC in ancient Athens. Actually both Aristotle, who had the nickname, Peripatetikos (Walker), and Socrates used walking as a pedagogical process to think and teach, and like Socrates, Aristotle conducted his lectures while walking.

The father of modern evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, is also said to have built walking into his intellectual routine, and he took daily walks. Albert Einstein took long walks around Princeton, often barefoot. He noted: “I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head.” The Danish existentialist philosopher discussed below, Søren Kierkegaard, loved solitary city walks, and had said: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” Ludwig van Beethoven took long daily walks with a pen and paper to write down inspirations for his symphonies. He was a nature lover, and walking helped him clear his mind and helped his creative process.  Charles Dickens was also a passionate walker. In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd, says that he habitually walked twelve miles in two-and-a-half hours. Dickens wrote: “I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road.”.He often walked for hours during the night. These nocturnal walks were an essential part of his writing because they allowed him to get acquainted with various parts of London, to absorb its atmosphere, and meet people from the grittier parts of the city.

In her book, Wanderlust, which I’ve referred to in an older post, Rebecca Solnit explores what it is like to be out in the world performimg the basic human action of walking. In presenting her topic she weaves stories and events, and diverse reasons to walk from religious pilgrimages and protest marches, to mountaineering, hiking and meandering. Solnit refers to philosophers, figures from literature, activists and others, and considers the interplay of our body and the world, and the freedom and pleasure that walking can offer us. Frédéric Gros, a long-distance rambler himself, in the same vein, includes others’ stories, interspersed with his own walking and hiking experiences, while pondering on why so many of the most productive writers and philosophers in history have all been avid walkers. He provides examples mostly from philosophy, literature, religion and political movements.

The book proved a very interesting read, but it also raised some questions, like why women’s stories have not been included in this volume, since there have certainly been famous women thinkers and writers since antiquity, who have been avid walkers and hikers, and who have actually written about their experiences. Of course, a book requires one to create an area of focus, and thus, it cannot contain everything. It’s inevitably influenced by the writer’s personal preferences and field of expertise, as well as, the fact that the topic of walking can be discussed in relation to many other themes. Moreover, including examples of women would have probably required a discussion about why women have mostly been omitted from this narrative and the reasons their voices have been ignored in walking literature, the societal restrictions that women (and marginalized groups, the elderly or individuals with disabilities) have faced, as well as, the issues of safety of walking alone in public that they often have come up against. In her book, Wanderers: History of Women Walking, Kerri Andrews, a writer and hiker herself, focuses on ten famous women, and she describes the prejudice or threats endured by women for whom walking was important.

Gros has not even included women philosophers and literary figures like his compatriot, Simone de Beauvoir, or Belgian-French explorer, Alexandra David-Néel. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), a renowned French existentialist philosopher, was also an avid hiker. In 1931 she embarked on long treks. Beauvoir writes about how she became attuned to her body and her surroundings, how she relished the physical exertion at the end of the day, and how her hiking in the mountains shaped her understanding of embodied subjectivity. Belgian-French explorer, Alexandra David-Néel, born in 1868, was the first foreign woman to explore Tibet. In 1924, at the age of 55, she disguised herself as a beggar and trekked across the freezing Himalayas and made her way to the holy city of Lhasa, which at the time, was forbidden to foreigners.

There are many more famous women. To mention, but a few European women only, Iris Murdoch, is also another important novelist and philosopher, who was an avid walker, and Virginia Woolf, the famed 20th-century author and essayist, took long walks through London and the countryside to sort through her ideas, and her walks shaped her writing and inspired her essay, “Street Haunting.“ Woolf believed walking alone was essential to women’s freedom and creativity. There are many female literary figures like Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), a 19th-century prolific writer, sociologist and abolitionist who extensively explored the Scottish Highlands and the Lake District on foot. In her book, The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd, the Scottish writer and avid hiker, immortalized her physical and spiritual connection to walking. Jane Austen also liked to walk, particularly with her sister, and walking seems integral in her novels.

Many Greek women writers have also walked and climbed mountains since antiquity. One example, mentioned in the book briefly in the chapter on the Cynics, whose name derives from the Greek word for dog, κύων (kyon), is ancient philosopher Hipparchia the Cynic, who was born into a wealthy Thracian family, and later married the Cynic philosopher Crates around 325 BCE. They adopted a lifestyle of voluntary poverty and being outsiders, discarding their possessions and the typical gender roles of the time. Hipparchia attended symposia reserved for men only and debated philosophy in the agora, and walked and taught in the streets of Athens with Crates. Elli Alexiou (1894-1988), writer and educator, walked and explored the places she found herself in, and integrated her observations in her writing, and Galatea Kazantzaki’s (1881-1962) experiences and adventures are reflected in her writing, too. One contemporary historian and writer that comes to mind is Lena Divani, who has written a book, Τι έμαθα περπατώντας στον κόσμο / What I’ve learnt walking the world, which concerns her hiking and climbing adentures in places like New Zealand, Cuba, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Venezouela, India, Patagonia, and elsewhere.

However, to come back to the book, Gros includes an interesting chapter on the English poet William Wordsworth, who composed his long lyrical poems while walking, took to the road like a poor man, not through necessity but for pleasure, and, as Gros tells us, the incomprehension and hostility that Wordsworth encountered underlines the difference that exists between serious walking and the afternoon promenade that people of his class engaged in. In the late eighteenth century walking was mostly the lot of the poor, vagabonns or travelling showmen and pedlars. He quotes Christopher Morley who wrote that Wordsworth was one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy. In this chapter Gros does mention Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, but does not refer to her as the celebrated 18th-century diarist, who was also an avid walker and nature explorer, and who often accompanied her brother during his long walks.

Gros writes beautifully about walking for the joy and well-being it can bring, about hiking and trekking in more rugged landscapes to achieve a sense of freedom, about walking to facilitate thinking or to understand our primal human nature, about walking in urban and rural areas, in parks and in the wilderness, walking as a leaving and walking as a return, the pleasure of return and the pleasure of rest after a long walk, about religious pilgrimages, and protest marches and political disobedience, his own experiences, and more. He explores the meaning of walking, the different reasons and ways we walk, and he introduces us to philosophers, poets and writers, and other historical figures for whom walking was important and crucial to their work, and who sometimes engaged in it to the point of collapse. He urges us to remember the toddler’s bliss when taking their first steps and their eagerness to move on their own, and he invites us to examine our own walking.

People walk for different reasons: for pleasure, for exercise, for its health benefits, to achieve a sense of freedom, for clarity, concentration and peace, out of necessity, out of a sense of adventure and to engage in exploration, as a form of escape, to think, to see the world, to celebrate, to protest and demonstrate, or in search of God. They walk for peace and they march in military parades. He considers how walking gives us the opportunity to go more slowly in a fast and full of distractions era, or the freedom that walking and sleeping outdoors, in a camp or shelter, for instance, allows us to experience, how it can help us escape our excessively sedentary and indoor lives. He discusses the benefits of solitary walking, the embracing of silence for a while and the experience of pleasure and well-being. He proposes that the monotony of bodily effort, the repetitive process, liberates the mind, and can both bring about calm and fuel the output of thought and creative work. This elemental practice, he says, gives us joy and pleasure, clears our mind and allows for awe and wonder, frees us and increases our sense of agency. He writes there is the suspensive freedom that comes by walking, and that even a simple short stroll allows one to “throw off the burden of cares…..escape the constraints of work, throw off the yoke of routine.” He also considers whether we also walk being aware at some level that old age might, and death will certainly strip us of the capacity to walk.

Gros considers various cultural forms of walking like religious pilgrimages, and significant pilgrimage routes and sites in the world, which for Christians would be Rome, Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela. Pilgrims walk for a variety of reasons he tells us, but what they have in common is that they walk, exert themselves, cut themselves off, leave lives and people behind, at least for a while. Pilgrims have historically taken to walking, often to distant destinations, for faith, to give thanks for a specific favour, to ask for intercession if a relative is sick, or if they themselves are seriously ill, or as a penance for very serious mistakes or sins, and in the past even for crimes that had gone unpunished, There have also been monks that spent their entire lives walking on narrow mountain paths. Some, he writes, can still be found in Mount Athos (in Greece). Gross writes that behind every pilgrimage we can find a utopia and a story of internal transformation, of regeneration and of presence, or of rebirth through walking and enduring suffering. As an example of the utopia of rebirth through walking, for instance, he refers to the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in Tibet, regarded by many Oriental religions as a holy place, and the centre of the universe. As an example of the utopia of cosmic rebirth, he writes about the great peyote walk accomplished annually by the Huichol people of Mexico, and where the objective of their pilgrimage is to reach Wirikuta, the Land of the Ancestors, where the peyote grows.

Walking can certainly have a political dimension, too. Gros discusses how systems and structures, such as class, capatilism, determine how, why or where we walk, but he avoids discussing how sexism, racism, marginalization of people, and forms of policing often also hinder the process of walking. He does however; demonstrate the link between walking and civil disobedience in various historical contexts. For instance, he refers to Gandhi’s political philosophy and practice. Gandhi walked and marched throughout his life in India, in Africa, in Europe, either as a preferred mode of getting about or as a way to reach people and engage them in peaceful protest marches. One example is the march for salt. The British had held a monopoly on harvesting salt in India and no one was allowed to trade in it or even extract some for personal use, and in order to achieve this, whenever natural salt was found close to populations, who might take it for their own use, destruction of the deposits took place.

Many vignettes are included in the book of philosophers, like Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a passionate and tireless walker, and walked both to relieve physical pain and to enhance his thinking capacity. He worked while walking or climbing mountains, composing some of his great works during these long walks. The 18th century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writing is filled with his walks, claimed he could not think and work without walking. His long search and walks in the woods in the second part of his life, writes Gros, led to his realization that “spite, suspicion and hatred aren’t rooted in primary savagery: they were grafted onto us, locked as we are in the world’s artificial garden, and have never stopped spreading since. That was the discovery of those open-ended walks.” He writes about Immanouel Kant’s routine walking. Every day the same stroll, at the same place, at the same time. His life, writes Gros, “was as exactly ruled as a music manuscript paper.” His route through the park in Prussia, now Russia, came to be called “The Philosopher’s Walk.” Gros also writes about Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, a distilled account of his two years living in the forest, and of the first philosophic treatise on walking, and presents his ideas on walking, simplicity, frugality, wilderness, profit and benefit. Thoreau claimed that walking, for instance, might be of no profit, but it’s of great benefit.

Gros also writes about walking as a means of escape or as intertwined with melancholy. He includes an essay on the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, and his fascination or rather intense urge to escape immobility, and comments that he finds in Rimbaud that sense of walking as flight. Rimbaud walked and travelled, obstinately and with passion. throughout his short life. He had said about himself: “I’m a pedestrian, nothing more.” Concerning Gérard de Nerval, Gros says that walking had become part of an active melancholia. He writes; “There’s a feeling of melancholy in Nerval’s attitude to walking.” There is also a chapter in the book about the societal pathologising of walking and pathological forms of walking, like “dromomania” in the 19th century, labels that nowadays, he writes, have fallen out of favour. I assume that today some of these cases might receive diagnoses like epileptic or dissociative episodes.  Gros reflects: “It is interesting to ask why walking came to be pathologized in this way, and tempting to draw parallels with the contemporary criminalizing of vagabonds and vagrants,” and adds that “authorities and respectable sedentary citizens” have always been suspicious of intrepid walkers.And as we know, all authoritarian regimes curtail freedom of movement.

Gros refers to the monotony and repetitive nature of walking in various parts of the book, how the act of simply putting one foot in front of the other allows the mind to both wander and quieten. It frees the mind to be present, to be still, to absorb and observe, and become aware of our.relationship with the landscape and our surroundings and the realization that we are part of it. He writes: “When we are walking, it isn’t so much that we are drawing nearer, more that the things out there become more and more insistent in our body. The landscape is a set of tastes, colours, scents which the body absorbs.” On writing about repetition he draws comparisons between walking and the process of chanting and repeating religious psalms. Similar to walking, he writes, chanting and the repetition of psalms can lead to heightened concentration and peace. Additionally, he claims that the slowness of walking allows us to notice, to see, to smell, to sense. He writes: “Repetition, slowness, gentleness: the walker too caresses the landscape for hours on end with their feet and eyes.” He talks about how “haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day…… You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen….”

He also describes how walking can also be a temporary escape from identity, as walking is a form of pure living. It provides a brief sense of escape and freedom and of leaving things behind, and brings about a tiredness that creates peacefulness. He writes: “…our complicated identities, our faces and masks. None of that can hold for long, because walking never calls for anything but the body……You are no longer a role, or a status……but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind.” Having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, and there are instances after having walked for a length of time when the body experiences its own lightness. This loosening however of identity requires certain prerequisites, and it may not be possible for everyone in every context, especially in urban areas, where people may not always feel safe and where movement may not always be free of constraints.

In one of his more political chapters with the title, Walking Together, he writes: “Regimes simultaneously divide and unite. Being jealous of our neighbour and hating outsiders are two complementary urges that make us forget the original scandal….: the separation between rulers and ruled, rich and poor…….. Everything is bound together by brandishing the spectre of the enemy or outsider, creating a smokescreen and masking the unjust division of society.” There’s also a chapter on the relationship between walking and gratitude. Gros writes: “Epicurus has a word for this: kharis (χάρις)…… Kharis: I am the recipient of a gift, to which I respond with gratitude. The tourist in a hurry and the persevering walker do not see the same thing. The former takes, captures, records, accumulates and expands their database. The latter offers thanks and gives him or herself up to the experience.” There are more themes discussed in the book like walking as survival. He refers to Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, the story of a father and young son’s wandering on foot in an apocalyptic environment, where they have nothing to cling on but hope, their humanity and their love for each other.

Anοther philosopher that is included in the book is Kierkegaard, who spent his life walking, thinking and writing, and wrote about how each ‘stage on life’s way’ implied a certain way of walking (the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious). Gros opens the chapter with a memory from Kierkegaard’s childhood or perhaps a metaphorical story. In any case, this story tells us of a child who wanted to go out in the street to run and play, and his strict and controlling father made him walk with him across a long room, up and down, up and down, on and on, while imagining and talking about the things they might have seen and encountered in the streets of Copenhagen.There’s also a brief reference to the trauma associated with the Corsair Affair, which influenced Kierkegaard’s thinking and work to further assert individualism in defiance of crushing societal pressures, to critique the role of the mass media, and the social process of leveling in which the uniqueness of the individual is rendered non-existent.

Towards the end of the book Gross writes about Proust and leisure strolls, the ones we took as children and the ones we take as adults to relax, in parks, on pavements and around our neighbourhood. He takes us back in time to Paris, when entry to the curated public gardens was originally denied to the rabble and only high society was allowed in, and also discusses the origins of the flâneur, the city dweller, who wanders without destination in a city, in order to experience it, to take in the sights, smells and the city scape.  Gross writes, “The flâneur appeared at a time when the city had acquired enough scale to become a landscape. It could be crossed as if it were a mountain, with its passes, its reversals of viewpoint, its dangers and surprises too. It had become a forest, a jungle,” and adds that this form of strolling presupposes the presence of three conditions: the city, the crowd, and the reign of merchandise. In the final chapter on weariness and the reasons he walks, Gros says: walking “gently wears away at the body as if it were being polished, resulting in a radiant weariness.”