Free A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros

self-preservation previous to the appearance of that passion, allays the ardour, with which he naturally pursues his private welfare, by an innate abhorrence to see beings suffer that resemble him.
    Spite, suspicion and hatred aren’t, therefore, rooted in primary savagery: they were grafted onto us, locked as we are in the world’s artificial garden, and have never stopped burgeoning and developing to stifle our naturally compassionate heart.
    That was the discovery of those open-ended walks through the undergrowth, following wandering paths; losing yourself the better to hear your heart, to feel the first man palpitating within you. You come out of that better adjusted to yourself: you no longer worship yourself, you simply love yourself. You come out of it better adjusted toothers: you no longer detest them, you sincerely pity them. In the end, from those paths bathed in the tranquillity of a tired sun, the gentleness of dead leaves circling to the ground, the deep slow natural breathing, from there the civilized world, society with its fears, its tinpot grandiloquence, its electric thrills, its furies: all that, seen from down there, from behind the sweet barrier of trees, seems nothing more than one long-drawn-out disaster.

    Nightfall. Rousseau was now nearly sixty years old. He had become an outcast, rejected by all, proscribed everywhere, in republican Geneva as well as monarchist France. He made a pathetic attempt to become an exile in England, but created far too many enemies there. For a long time he wandered here and there, half in hiding, and several times considered having himself jailed to sample peaceful prison walls. And then came the long, slow moment when he
gave way
.
    He gave it all up. Those were his last walks: he returned to Paris, drained of courage, unwilling to fight on. And there he was forgotten, little by little, as society’s focus moved on to other things, other hatreds. And that was that.
    I am referring to the last walks, the ones that punctuate the book
Reveries
, or rather the ones that can be discerned in it, far beyond books. I am talking about those undefined walks, not undertaken to
prepare
for anything, not seen as an opportunity to
find
new words (new defences, new identities, new ideas). The walks one imagines at Ermenonville,the last ones in May and June 1778. There is no longer even the act of walking as a method, a heuristic and a projection. Walking is no longer undertaken to fuel invention, but exactly for
nothing
: just to connect with the movement of the sinking sun, to echo with slow tread the cadence of the minutes, hours and days. To walk like that is to punctuate the day a little, without really thinking about it, as one’s fingers unconsciously tap out the beat of a tune on a table-top. Essentially a matter of no longer expecting anything, letting time come, surrendering to the floodtide of days and the exhaustion of nights. Well-being in that context requires a uniform and moderate movement, without either shocks or pauses. Walking thus means accompanying time, matching its pace as one does with a child.
    Then, during those long crepuscular walks, forgotten memories, welcome as old friends, rise to the surface of the conscious mind. Memories for which one at last feels indulgence. They no longer wound by reawakening painful episodes, or fatigue the soul with yearning for a lost happiness. They come floating up like aquatic flowers, differing only in their shifting colours and shapes. Indifferent, smiling, meaningful only in the vague, amusing, detached certainty of having once experienced them … Was that really me, that dreamy child, that young man intoxicated by worldliness?
    Rousseau had once been able to say that while walking he was master of his imaginings, having to come to terms only with his visions, absolutely certain of his dreams. The last walks by contrast have the immense gentlenessof detachment, a letting go, with nothing left to hope for or expect.