My second foray into the Brooklyn Book Festival was the Walker in the City panel, where the venerable Edmund White coaxed writers to reveal the imaginary forces behind a common theme in their writing: the distance their main characters covered, both geographic and metaphysical.
On the docket: Sergio Chejfec (Argentina), Geoff Nicholson (UK), and Teju Cole (Nigeria). It was Chefjec whose thoughts about walking struck me most. His character in My Two Worlds wanders an unfamiliar Brazilian city with neither point nor pretense. The narrator is not out for inspiration. Rather, his mind is a blank slate, and the narrator’s meanderings mirror that of the vacancy of the mind. The walk takes on, as one reviewer notes, the “dramatic realm of the incidental.”
Such a poetic thought: the dramatic realm of the incidental.
And such a dramatic thought: that one does not necessarily need a purpose for a promenade. Walking is a fundamental action that one can just do. The walk can be long, short, circuitous, random, whimsical, melancholic, brisk, a stroll, ponderous, or any number of experiences.
Generally speaking, there is no economic cost to walking, so it falls under no economic umbrella. A walk doesn’t have to be determined either, except by the occasional natural (river, cliff) or manmade (fence, wall) hindrances, so it escapes autocratic and any other kind of outside rule.
Which makes me wonder: is walking one of the most anarchic, radically independent acts one can embark upon?
It seems to me that there are three very fundamental, radical, individual acts which are, by and large, out of the control of the state and other actors: walking, thinking, and suicide.
If so, then a walk in the woods can be a very empowering, rebellious activity.
Or am I walking toward a deep end?
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