The Literature of Walking

 In The Dharma Bums , walking is primarily meditation and escape. It is meditation because the walkers pronounce themselves Buddhists practicing the Buddhist tradition. It is an escape in that the narrator treats walking as a nonconformist path, away from the capitalist movements and desires of the narrator’s modern world.       We have seen a similar approach to walking in the Peace Pilgrim, a woman who used walking as a protest, or less actively, a means through which to promote a countercultural movement. The Dharma Bums and Peace Pilgrim both, in varying degrees of assertiveness, walk for this purpose. The Dharma Bums revise the Peace Pilgrim’s tradition by internalizing their countercultural mission. They adopt an attitude which is totally separate from the Peace Pilgrim’s in that they do not impart their philosophy on the public. In this way, they revise Martin Luther King’s walk of protest as well. The Dharma Bum’s mission is innately introverted, making...

"I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand..." So Japhy Ryder begins his drunken monologue on the philosophy of the Dharma Bums and his vision of the coming youth revolution. It's a revealing passage, both for its importance to our understanding of the narrative and for the way it so extremely demonstrates the author's style. The Dharma Bums is rendered in what Jack Kerouac called "spontaneous prose," capturing the unedited meanderings of the mind, prioritizing the content of the written word over any grammatical structure. Japhy's monologue, if it'd even be accurate to call it that, comes in the form of a single sentence of over 220 words. It's reminiscent of a prolonged jazz solo, a deliber...

I read  The Salt Path by  Winn. She engages with walking in a way that’s way more intense than some of the other walking books we see. Instead of walking just to think introspectively, or to clear her head, her and her husband, Moth, are walking because they have no other choice. They lost their home, their money, and so the 630 mile trail they start becomes their 'home'. They do that to redefine their life away from the traditional homelessness they were about to experience. Winn makes us engage with the trail as a place of survival, talking about the pain and salt on their skin, the hunger, and the struggle of pitching their cheap tent. She engages walking by using it as an essential means, not a means to grow internally, but to get through an extremely difficult time in their life. She also dramatizes the walk in how she tells the story in such a descriptive way. She didn't expect the walk would give them the experience it did, and her accounts of their life with Moth b...

  After reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson,the text’s focus on walking is unique from everything else we’ve read this semester. When Bryson discusses the actual walking it is either a focus on the physical difficulty of it or is summarized. This works well for the novel’s readability because if every section were Bryson complaining about the walk I don’t think any reader would make it to the end of the book. But, he also discusses how when walking his brain seems to turn itself off and he finds himself lost in the joy of being able to walk the Appalachian Trail. As one reads on the complaining becomes less frequent and Bryson uses these moments to segue readers into the broader topics he explores in A Walk in the Woods . Rather than spending his word count on romanticizing the walk or commodifying it for pure entertainment, Bryson’s mind fixates on an interdisciplinary view of the trail. He floats from discussing the historical elements like the conception and building of t...

I walk the trails at Griffy Lake often enough that the place feels familiar, but the experience of walking it never feels exactly the same. Returning again and again has made me more attentive to the small changes that happen along the trail. The path itself is predictable, the same turns, the same stretches of packed dirt and exposed roots and trees, but the details shift constantly. Some days the lake is perfectly still and perfectly reflects the trees, while other days the wind moves across the surface and breaks the reflection into fragments of light. Walking there today has made me notice things I would normally pass by without thinking. This kind of attention feels similar to the way Nan Shepherd describes experiencing the mountains in The Living Mountain. The point is not to reach a destination quickly or treat the landscape as something to move through. Instead, the walk is about noticing what is already there. When I walked at Griffy today, I started to pay attention to detai...

  After learning about the practice of circumambulation, I thought I would test it out for myself. My girlfriend, Ally, and I went to walk a circumambulation around Yellowwood Lake on an abnormally sunny and warm Saturday in February. While the lake might not be sacred to most people it is to us. We’ve shared some of our favorite memories on the trails there in past summers and every time we return it feels like we regain our proximity to those memories, conversations, and emotions we experienced there.  From the beginning to the end of the circumambulation the lake was always to our right as we set out clockwise around the lake. Having never visited the lake in winter before we were shocked at how open the forest felt. All of the dense vegetation and leaves had hibernated for the winter allowing for three-hundred-sixty degree views in the forest. The lake was in view and Ally noted that she had never realized how close the trail was to the lake during our past hikes. Last Jul...