I’ve long been interested in walking as an intellectual, and cognitively stimulating, activity. So it was cool to find two essays in the Guardian about walking and thinking.

First is a long, pleasantly diverting essay by Carole Cadwalladr about Frederic Gros and his new book A Philosophy of Walking:

Walking is not sport, he says, in the first line of his book, A Philosophy of Walking. Sport is a discipline, “an ethic, a labour”. It is a performance. Walking, on the other hand, “is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found”. If you want to go faster, he says, don’t walk. Do something else: drive, slide, fly….

As a philosopher, his interest is in “ordinary things”, he says. In Britain, academic philosophy is, largely, analytical philosophy. It’s concerned with logic, with language. Whereas in France, he belongs to “a new generation that is concerned with the… quotidien. The everyday.”

And you see the philosophy of walking as part of the philosophy of the everyday?

“Yes. It is still looking at the questions of eternity, solitude, time and space… But on the basis of experience. On the basis of very simple, very ordinary things.”

He’d always enjoyed walking but it was only when he started his philosophical studies that Gros started noticing how many great philosophers were also great walkers. “That is, it was not just that walking was a distraction from their work. It was that walking was really their element. It was the condition of their work.”

Second, a 2012 review of Merlin Coverley’s The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker:

Coverley’s interesting thesis is, essentially, that walking and writing are one activity. To illustrate this, after a short discussion of pilgrim writers, he looks at a diverse range of walker-writers stretching from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to his fellow modern-day psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, via John Clare, William Blake, the English and American romantic poets, Parisian flâneurs, Rudolf Hess and the situationist international to support it. His walker/writers are what might be called romantic individualists. For a Rousseau or a William Wordsworth, the act of walking through the world was not primarily about the world itself; they were much more concerned with walking into their inner worlds. From the day Rousseau turned his back on his native city, these peripatetic writer-thinkers were bent on walking into a kind of alienated individuality. Coverley’s walkers are professional outsiders; visionaries and dreamers on the road.

The latter makes me want to visit Connemara, on the western coast of Ireland; the first makes me just want to go back to Paris.