Walking with Plato (14 page)

It was like waking up on-board the
Mary Celeste
. Or going down to breakfast, post-Rapture, at a motel in Knoxville, Tennessee.

We sat at a table and waited. But nothing happened. So I got up and peeked into the kitchen, which was empty and dark.

On my way back to the table, I spotted some boxes of cereal, some milk, and some cartons of juice on the bar counter. Beside them was a note explaining that the chef was unable to come in that morning. It instructed us to help ourselves to cereal, deduct ten per cent from our bill, leave payment . . . and be on our way.

I had the feeling – perhaps wrongly – that the note had been scribbled in haste by someone anxious to avoid any interaction with possibly disgruntled guests.

Sadly, the cereals were all of the chocolate/honey/sugar-coated varieties that are inedible to persons above eight years old. So I scribbled a note of my own, leaving my email address and telephone number, and offering to negotiate a fair price for our breakfastless stay. I never did hear from them. But my offer still stands.

From Carlops, we continued southeast, taking a rambling route for twenty-four miles to
Innerleithen
, a small town in the Scottish Borders.

During the morning, we walked for ten miles across a sparsely populated area of farmland and woodland. It had few footpaths, and so we had to cobble together a route from any bits of minor road we could find that went in vaguely the right direction.

At midday, we arrived at Eddleston, our first village of the day. From there we’d intended to walk along a dismantled railway, alongside the rivers Eddleston Water and Tweed, to Innerleithen.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t
find
the railway path. The bits that were marked as such on the map seemed to have been transformed into houses and gardens in the real world. So, rather than enjoying a congenial riverside walk, we had to slog fourteen miles along the uncongenial A703.

It wasn’t a great day, especially since we didn’t find a shop where we could buy ‘breakfast’ until we passed through the town of Peebles, midway through the afternoon.

That night, we stayed on a campsite at the edge of Innerleithen, beside the River Tweed. This was actually rather nice since the town is surrounded by some pretty hills. So the day ended pleasantly.

From there, we walked seventeen miles along a cycle route, following the winding course of the River Tweed, to
Melrose
: a small town that lies adjacent to the larger town of Galashiels
.

For Wendy, this was a pleasant riverside walk through woods and fields and across moorland hills. But for me it was a day of blister-agony, especially the last couple of urban miles through Galashiels and Melrose to our campsite.

Although we had walked for only three days since leaving Edinburgh, I had to take a rest day at Melrose. My feet hurt so badly that, apart from hobbling a few hundred yards to a café, I barely moved for the entire time.

In my walking-induced meditative state, I not only listened to music the way I did when I was a teenager, I read that way too.

Throughout JoGLE, while lying in my sleeping-bag at night, I would read a chapter or two of
War and Peace
. And, as the journey progressed, I felt more and more in tune with what Tolstoy had to say.

Whenever I read a novel, it’s my practice to highlight any passage that moves or inspires me. And by this stage of my journey I’d highlighted scores of passages from
War and Peace
. Every few pages I came across something that made me mentally exclaim, ‘Yes – I see it too!’

This made me recall being nineteen or twenty years old, and lying on my bed, one evening, reading J.D. Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
.

When I reached the final section, where Franny, who is having some kind of breakdown, learns the great secret that pulls her back from the abyss – namely that the ‘Fat Lady’ is Christ himself – I experienced a kind of ecstasy.

Like all intense aesthetic experiences, it’s impossible to describe except by analogy. It was as though something had expanded inside my chest, as though my soul had floated up out of my body, as though a door inside me had been unlocked.

I’d been an avid reader since I was five years old, and had loved and enjoyed hundreds of books. But, until that moment, I’d never imagined that a book, a story, a collection of words, could do that to someone.

The same thing – the expansion of the chest, the floating of the soul, the unlocking of the door – has happened to me, more than once, while listening to Kate Bush.

For example, I recall listening to the
Hounds of Love
album, one time, and somehow the experience became transcendental. The words, the music, the emotion, and the sound of her voice began to resonate – to
throb
 – inside me. I was transported.

Both of these experiences were, I believe, examples of what the Ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus labelled ‘the sublime’.

In his essay
Of the Sublime
, Longinus observes that certain works of poetry and rhetoric have the power not just to entertain us or to convince us, but to ravish us, to transport us.

‘Great writing,’ he says, ‘does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself.’ It ‘commits a pleasing rape upon the very soul of the reader’.

Works of such quality and power, Longinus claims, can proceed only from writers of genius: those with elevated and impassioned spirits, with grand and lofty ideas, and with the ability to communicate all of this through the inspired use of words, rhythms, and figures of speech.

Of course, the experience of the sublime depends not only upon the qualities of the writer, but also upon the qualities of the reader.

I see it this way. When Salinger wrote
Franny and Zooey
, he had a profound insight throbbing inside him. This wasn’t something he could express directly, but only through the medium of a story, through the interplay of various characters, through certain rhythms and figures of speech.

My nineteen- or twenty-year-old self was receptive and sympathetic to this idea, was already, in a sense, grasping for it. But it required Salinger’s genius, passion, plotting, characterization, and inspired use of language to bring it to birth.

Similarly, on those occasions when Kate Bush’s music has transported me, it’s because somehow, through her inspired use of words, music, sounds, and images, she has caused something deep within her own soul to resonate with something deep inside mine.

And there, on JoGLE, the same thing was happening with Tolstoy. The combination of his genius and my receptiveness enabled me to appreciate, in a deep way, the sublimity of his work.

For the next stage of our journey, from Melrose to
Jedburgh
, we could have taken an eighteen-mile scenic route along St Cuthbert’s Way: a sixty-two-mile walking trail that begins at Melrose and ends at the island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast, in England.

However, my feet were so tender that we opted for a more direct route instead. This took us thirteen miles, mostly along nondescript minor roads, but also along a section of Dere Street, an old Roman road.

Dere Street originally ran between
Eboracum
(York) and
Inchtuthil
near present-day Falkirk. A lot of it still exists today in the form of A-roads, but the section we walked is now a tree-lined grassy track that passes through Ancrum Moor, where the Scots won a notable victory over the English in 1545.

This four-mile section of the walk was a real treat, but it would be difficult to explain why. It was a dead-straight walk through rough pasture. It passed by a few farms, a couple of streams, a pond or two, and the occasional gnarled old tree. Nothing special when you come to analyse it. But somehow, it just
was
fabulous.

It was while passing through Ancrum Moor that Wendy and I first started to play ‘Fives’: a conversation game that kept us entertained, on and off, all the way from Melrose to Land’s End.

The ‘game’, if it deserves that title, was simplicity itself. We just picked a category – footpaths, animals, real ales, shower blocks, or whatever – and together compiled a list of the top or bottom five, so far, on JoGLE.

We
loved
that game. And a large part of the reason we loved it is because, by that time, we’d both become such pleasant companions.

In a letter to his niece, Kierkegaard wrote: ‘I had been walking for an hour and a half and had done a great deal of thinking, and with the help of motion had really become a very agreeable person to myself.’

In a similar way, during the scores of hours that we had been in motion since leaving John o’Groats, Wendy and I had become very agreeable persons to ourselves – and, consequently, to each other.

It was odd, really. You would think that spending every hour of every day together for such an extended period of time might have made us bored and irritable with one another. And, in normal circumstances, perhaps it might have done. But, out there in the countryside, it didn’t. Quite the reverse.

Walking through the countryside, getting plenty of fresh air and exercise, and escaping from the workaday cares and stresses of life, brought out the nicer, more agreeable people inside us.

Wendy sometimes assures me that there’s a generous and caring person inside my moody, taciturn exterior. And it was one of JoGLE’s most unexpected pleasures, for me – and perhaps for her – to see him emerge.