Action: walking
For most people, walking is a reflex act, without reflection, which when it becomes reflective, attentive to non-everyday, even disruptive moments[1], can provide us with knowledge, fulfilment, satisfaction in what we have experienced and what we have imagined.
The act of walking has led novelists, poets, filmmakers… to describe and get to know landscapes through the process of advancing in them; some examples could be the non-fiction travel books by Josep M. Espinàs[2] or those of Camilo José Cela[3]. Walking on a long fictional journey is the engine that drives J.R.R. Tolkien[4] to describe a fantastic world and its power relations or the film director Akira Kurosawa[5] to discover the Siberian steppe on a long and dangerous trek. There are many examples in literature and in film whose plots are based on walking, in the same way as poets[6] remind us that what is important is the action of walking, the ability to describe, chart, learn along and from the way, as a metaphor of the path-destination as a goal, the figurative sense of work in progress.
[1] As Richard Sennett reminds us, “Daily routines, Hannah Arendt once provocatively observed, leave little trace in consciousness; people come to treat these routines as just natural, and so rather neutral in value over the course of time. More pointedly, the urbanist Kevin Lynch argued, in The Image of the City, that everyday rhythms of walking are superficial stimulations which recede in value unless something threatening occurs in their course. Both comments mean that ordinary experience is not fully registered if it lacks disruptive drama”. (Sennet 2014, p. 49)
[2] From 1957 to 2007 Josep M. Espinàs published 19 travel books that describe his walks through various places and in a traditional way he describes their inhabitants. Some titles are: Viatge al Pirineu de Lleida (1957); A peu per la Llitera (1990); A peu pel País Basc (2000); A peu per l’Alt Camp (2007).
[3] Between 1948 and 1990, Camilo José Cela published 13 travel books. Like Espinàs, he describes places and people in a traditional way; some of his titles are: Viaje a la Alcarria (1948); Primer viaje andaluz. Notas de un vagabundaje por Jaén, Córdoba, Sevilla, Huelva y sus tierras (1959); Viaje al Pirineo de Lérida (1965); and Galicia (1990).
[4] In the trilogy The lord of the rings (1954-1955) J.R.R. Tolkien describes how the Fellowship of the Ring walks through meticulously described invented places and landscapes, fantastic worlds that have been adapted to film.
[5] In Dersu Uzala: The hunter (1975) Kurosawa describes how a nomadic hunter, Dersu Uzala, teaches captain Vladimir Arsenyev as they walk through the Siberian steppe to observe, understand, read and respect nature and to live in total harmony with it, a lesson in the semiotics of space.
[6] The final purpose is to walk, it is where events take place. This is how Antonio Machado shaped it in his poem Caminante no hay camino (Wanderer there is no way), where he stresses that “you make the way as you go”, or Konstantínos Kaváfis with his poem Ithaca, in which he talks about the importance of enjoying the way, any way, as a destination, a metaphor that can be extended to all processes in life.
