Walking with Plato (11 page)

As I walked over the hills, across the moors, and through the forests towards Drymen, musing upon the link between walking and inspiration, it occurred to me that some of the people whom I most admire made walking an integral part of their routine.

Charles Dickens was addicted to walking. Often, when working intensely on a project, he would cover fifteen or twenty miles in a single night ‘through the black streets of London’.

These brisk, nocturnal walks seemed to act as a physical release for the mental strain and psychological stress of writing. ‘If I could not walk far and fast,’ he said, ‘I think I should just explode and perish.’

But additionally, and just as importantly, walking unleashed his creativity.

He would often plot his novels on the move.
A Christmas Carol
, for example, was brought to birth during a series of nocturnal ramblings in the winter of 1843. He told a friend that he had ‘composed it in his head, laughing and weeping and weeping again’, as he walked.

Bertrand Russell also incorporated daily walks into his creative routine. Only after spending an hour or two outdoors, pacing around and organizing his thoughts, would he sit down at his desk to write. Then the words flowed quickly and easily from his pen.

Or, to press the point home with just one more example, consider the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche suffered bouts of depression throughout his life, which became more prolonged and intense as he grew older, and eventually gave way to madness. (At the time, his mental illness was diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, though it now seems more likely that he was suffering from a slowly developing brain tumour.)

Like Kierkegaard and Rousseau, Nietzsche found walking therapeutic. In fact, his need of it seems to have been even greater than theirs.

For example, during the 1880s, Nietzsche rented a room, most summers, in a house in Sils-Maria, high in the Swiss Alps. While there, health and weather permitting, he would go for two brisk walks each day: a two-hour walk before lunch, and an even longer one after lunch.

These walks, through the forest or along the shores of Lake Silvaplana or Lake Sils, seem to have been necessary for his physical and mental wellbeing. But they were equally necessary for his creativity and inspiration.

As he walked, he would think. And, as thoughts occurred to him, he would jot them down in a notebook. This method of composition gave his philosophy and his writing a very distinctive character. It gave them a boldness and a free-spiritedness that would have been absent had he remained at his desk.

Indeed, Nietzsche went so far as to claim that thinking-while-walking was the
only
way to do philosophy. In his book
Twilight of the Idols
, which he composed in Sils-Maria in the summer of 1888, he wrote: ‘A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.’

In his earlier book
The Gay Science
, he criticized the practice of thinking and writing indoors, hemmed in by narrow walls and low ceilings ‘with compressed belly and head bent over paper’. Such surroundings and such a posture, he claimed, can give rise only to stale, constipated thoughts.

He wrote: ‘It is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.’

Like Dickens, Russell, and Nietzsche, I too – in my own small way – can testify to the link between walking and creativity.

For me, JoGLE wasn’t entirely a holiday. I had very little in the way of work to do, but I did have to produce my ‘Living’ column for Singapore’s national newspaper,
The Straits Times
, once a fortnight.

Generally, I find writing it – or, indeed, writing
anything
 – very hard work. I dither about, and suffer crises of confidence, and stare at a blank screen, and go over and over the same few lines without making any actual progress, and generally have a difficult time of it.

But during JoGLE, I wrote more quickly and easily than I have ever written before. I dashed off my column, which normally takes me anything between eight and twelve hours, in just three or four hours – and that while lying in a backpacker tent with no laptop.

The reason was simple. Although I gave no specific thought to my column as I walked, and although I didn’t consciously set out to think about anything at all, my mind was constantly turning over thoughts and ideas.

Like Tolstoy’s Pierre, my soul was occupied every day with things ‘important and comforting’, and so I always had something worthwhile to share.

At Drymen, we camped on a rough-and-ready farm campsite, and then set off, the next morning, on the final section of the West Highland Way.

This was a flat and easy thirteen-mile walk, which took us out of the Highlands, through some rural lowlands and into the centre of
Milngavie
(pronounced
Millguy
or
Mullguy
), a commuter town situated just six miles from Glasgow city centre.

Overall, the walk was very pleasant, as far as I recall. But the thing about it that sticks in my mind is the shock and dismay Wendy and I felt as we entered the outskirts of town and found the footpaths, verges, and bushes littered with cigarette butts, crisp packets, fast-food cartons, and dog-shit.

When you live in a town or a city, you get so used to that stuff that you forget how ugly and depressing and dehumanizing it all is. But after spending a few weeks on the moors, in the glens, and beside the lochs and streams, you see it all afresh – and it disgusts you.

We dutifully visited the obelisk that marks the southern end of the West Highland Way, which is incongruously situated on a pedestrianized street in the town centre, and then shopped for supplies, before heading a mile or so out of town to our campsite at Bankell Farm.

That night, just before sleep, a strange and unexpected thought entered my head.

Up to that point, during four weeks of JoGLE, I’d always thought of our backpacker tent as nothing more than a necessary inconvenience.

Necessary
, because backpacking is the only way to do End to End without breaking the bank. Over the course of three months, camping works out approximately £5,000 cheaper than B&B-ing.

Inconvenient
, because the tent has to be lugged around for eight hours a day, because it has to be erected each evening and taken down each morning, because it isn’t big enough to hold you and your stuff comfortably, because it’s wet through with dew every morning when you have to pack it away, and because it’s infuriatingly difficult to get out of and back into when you need the loo in the night.

So, bearing all of this in mind, it came as a surprise, as I drifted off to sleep that final night on the West Highland Way, to find the thought ‘I love my tent!’ popping unannounced into my head.

Whether it was the expression of a genuine emotion or the product of some half-sleeping delirium, I couldn’t – and still can’t – say.

But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty – the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life – thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty, simple and divine?

—Plato,
Symposium

Chapter Four

Sentimental Journey

Milngavie – Falkirk – Linlithgow – Kirknewton – Carlops – Innerleithen – Melrose – Jedburgh – Byrness

Before setting out on JoGLE, Wendy and I spent a long time pondering how to get from the end of the West Highland Way, at Milngavie, to the start of the Pennine Way, at Kirk Yetholm. There’s no established walking route between these two places. There are few campsites and fewer hostels. And there’s not much in the way of scenery either.

In the end, we decided to enliven the journey by taking an indirect route via Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, which we both adore. Apart from that, we had low expectations for this part of the journey. And, in the main, our expectations were fulfilled. Looking back, there are entire days I struggle to remember.

But, although the outer journey was dull, the inner journey wasn’t. Thoughts and ideas bloomed in those unstimulating surroundings like flowers in the desert.

We began with a twenty-four-mile forced march from
Milngavie
to
Falkirk
, most of it along the towpath of the Forth and Clyde Canal. Rain was forecast, so we decided to leave our tent at Milngavie, walk without backpacks, and return to Milngavie by train at the end of the day.