Suspended Falling: A Reading List on Walking

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Seven million years ago, maybe more, great apes started walking. We don’t know exactly why, although theories emphasize various evolutionary advantages: energy efficiency, resource transportation, movement versatility, and the ability to scan above the tall savanna grass. Whatever the reason, these early bipeds unwittingly walked down a new evolutionary branch which would lead, millions of years later, to their descendants—the species Homo sapiens—walking all around the world.

The vantage point of historical hindsight tempts us to imagine the moment our earliest ancestral biped, moving quadrupedally along a branch, decided to pause, lift a knuckle, then lift both knuckles, and then slowly rise—tottering, momentous!—and proceed to walk along the branch amid astonished gawks and cries from creatures all around. 

Of course, no such scene occurred. Our ancestors, like us, were simply animals standing and stepping and stumbling through aeons of iterative micro decisions into revolutionary evolution. Walking for them would have felt like walking does for most of us: as mindless as breathing, nothing like a revolutionary act.

But walking now can be very mindful, even mind-changing. Who among us hasn’t felt how the moment, manner, place, or company in which we walk dramatically affects our emotions and engagement with the world? Walking’s influence lies in its subconscious, underlying role in our lives. Shifting how we walk—something we have more agency over than our early ancestors—is like tweaking our operating system. And while our bodies evolve slowly, the environments in which our bodies walk have been evolving ferociously in recent lifetimes, forging abrupt new relationships—and new possibilities—between worlds and walkers.

I’ve always been intrigued by how environments influence the way we move, feel, and experience—and how our movements, in turn, change those environments. It’s a creative, even liberatory dynamic, but one rooted in place. In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane offers a more grounded framing: “Paths are the habits of a landscape,” he writes. The landscape beckons feet; feet imprint the landscape. This behooves us to walk good habits into the places we love.

This reading list roams from these reflections. Each piece tells a story about what it might mean to walk in a world of technological acceleration, ecological desecration, social tension, and psychological agitation. Some follow in ancient footsteps; others chart tentative new desire paths. All recognize the power of walking to challenge the norms guiding how we move around.

Traveling At The Speed Of The Soul (Nick Hunt, Noēma, April 2024)

In 2011, travel writer Nick Hunt walked 2,500 miles from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, in the footsteps of the canonical writer of walks, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Surely it would have been a wondrous feeling, after 221 days of trudging, to arrive at the glistening Bosphorus?

But my arrival didn’t feel like that. I was beyond exhaustion. I limped to the quayside, sat down and dragged off my stinking boots. The call to prayer was sounding, and the sky was full of seagulls. I felt happy, but in a distant way. Mostly, I felt like crying.

Hunt discovers the insights at the heart of this essay through an honest excavation of this anti-climax, which soon mutated into something deeper. After flying home to England, something—or nothing, or everything—was amiss. “Nothing had changed, and yet, confusingly, nothing was what I remembered,” Hunt recalls. He cites the 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta: “Traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.”

In the 2014 horror movie It Follows, a malevolent and shapeshifting figure follows its victim, unrelentingly, at walking speed. The victim can easily outrun it, even build a buffer of many weeks. But the cursed figure always, always follows. Reflecting on the unexpected violence and ongoing dislocation resulting from flying back over his entire walking route in 240 minutes, Hunt evokes and reimagines this haunting image. He considers an old idea that the soul travels at the speed of walking. If so, is the world not littered with souls walking toward, but never quite rejoining, their bodies—spiritual jetsam in the jet-setting age of evolutionary mismatch?

I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that the achievement of my walk—all the struggles, hardships, joys and revelations—had in some way been negated by the manner in which I’d returned. Flying had undone the walking, raveling it all back in. 

Much later I came to understand that, on a spiritual level, it had. I had not completed a walk, but half a pilgrimage.”

Hunt’s insights on pilgrimage are resonant today. Either despite of, or in response to the secularisation and fast travel of modernity, pilgrimage is undergoing a renaissance. Record numbers walked Spain’s Camino de Santiago in 2023. And in the UK, many new pilgrimage routes have recently opened, along with a British Pilgrimage Trust.

The role these new secular, spiritual pilgrimages play today is a fascinating question. Hunt’s essay, built on the embodied violence of his botched return, considers an often neglected piece of the puzzle: the return and recognition that “the real destination is your own front door.”

Street Haunting: A London Adventure (Virginia Woolf, The Yale Review, October 1927)

This essay by Virginia Woolf recounts a winter wander through London under the pretext of buying a pencil. It’s one of the great early meditations on urban walking as an enriching pursuit. Woolf’s prose soars, but her descriptions of marginalized people may sometimes feel crass by contemporary standards. Walking for Woolf is a literal and metaphorical flight from one’s socially sanctioned identity, which is deeply encoded—reassuringly, restrictively—into the fabric of home. 

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!

Woolf is free, flitting between fleeting sights and sounds, none fully followed but many triggering imaginative flights of fancy. She marvels with near hallucinogenic wonder at star-like lamps and glistening cars and even butchered carcasses, everything “accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty.” She daydreams of Mayfair balconies, bookshop encounters, and gazing over the Thames without a care. 

We are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colors have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?

Woolf’s walk doubles as an imaginative picaresque through possible people she—we—might have been or might become, swelling with poignancy until she daydreams headlong into that pencil: the task at hand, her “rod of duty.” A century later we can still relate to the tension between where we would love to wander and where we are duty bound to walk.

We Move Amongst Ghosts (Laura Grace Ford, Verso, May 2019)

In this piece, Ford sketches her walking methodology for her 2011 book, Savage Messiah. The book is a compilation of collaged zines charting “psychogeographic drifts” through 2000s London, “a city fracturing under the ideological assault of neoliberalism but still harbouring active currents of protest and resistance” amid “regeneration” efforts (forced gentrification) before the 2012 London Olympics. I recommend reading this essay alongside the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s original introduction to Ford’s book; together they form a beautiful, biting duet exhibiting the collectivity, collage, and asynchronicity that characterizes Ford’s walking.

Savage Messiah is a work of psychogeography: a lineage of (mostly walking) practices used for exploring and challenging the psychological effects of (mostly urban) spaces. Psychogeography was walked into life by the flâneurs and dérives of Paris and notable London walkers from Virginia Woolf to Iain Sinclair. Ford walks in this tradition, but critically. She isn’t interested in individual meandering, but in collective foraging for embers that might rekindle subcultural spaces into flame.

If the corporate-speak of the finance-capital matrix becomes the official text of the city then perhaps it is the alleys, unmarked paths and towpaths that harbour our unformed thoughts, half-remembered dreams and repressed memories. These are the spaces of potential where the channelling of other voices is possible. If we re-tread these overgrown paths we might reactivate these currents, imbue them with flashes of hallucinogenic colour. These are places where we might encounter older dreams, reconnect with the galvanising energies of long forgotten experiences.

The Fight for the Right to Trespass (Brooke Jarvis, The New York Times Magazine, July 2023)

In England, 97 percent of land and 92 percent of rivers are illegal for the public to access. However, a groundswell of recent activism, using trespass as a form of direct action, has been agitating for greater access and a more democratic guardianship of nature. In this piece, Brooke Jarvis captures the joy and empowerment in disobeying, reimagining the often absurd norms governing how and where we (don’t) walk.

Observing the peculiarly English manifestation of these issues from an American perspective is fun and effective. At least as an English reader, I can hear the overarticulated pronunciations of twee village names, and sense the light bafflement arising from Englishisms like “Cheddar-and-Branston-Pickle sandwiches” and a “giant puppet they called Old Crockern.” Comparisons between the country’s respective systems of land access are by turns instructive and amusing:

One resident nodded politely from behind a sign, “Please respect our privacy,” that I liked rather better than the sign one of my mother’s neighbors in the United States displays on her mailbox: “If you can read this, you’re in range.”

Jarvis also captures affecting moments that speak to the joy of walking as activism and reclaiming land for the common good. “It’s an antidote to everything feeling divided and enclosed,” says one mother of two on a walking trespass. And, during a swimming trespass:

More rounds of cheers went up as new waves of swimmers splashed into the water. An older woman wearing a pink floral swimsuit paused on the shore to turn to the crowd still on land. ‘Don’t be beaten down!’ she shouted, raising a fist above her flower-bedecked bathing cap. ‘Rebel!’ Then she, too, flopped into the lake.

Walking While Black (Garnette Cadogan, Literary Hub, July 2016)

For many people, simply walking in public is a form of resistance. In this essay, Garnette Cadogan renders this truth in devastating detail and disarmingly beautiful prose.

Cadogan fell in love with walking on the dangerous, dazzling streets of 1980s Kingston, Jamaica. This canvas of color, with its cast of lurking thieves and avuncular beggars, became a home away from a violent home. Cadogan weaves the universal curiosity of childhood and the evocative scenes into a vivid picture:

I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer, one moment sauntering down the streets to pick low-hanging mangoes that I could reach from the sidewalk, another moment hanging outside a street party with battling sound systems, each armed with speakers piled to create skyscrapers of heavy bass.

When Cadogan moves to New Orleans and then New York, he is excited to walk in the Land of the Free. A cake walk, compared to Kingston. Except, “what no one had told me was that I was the one who would be considered a threat.” What had started as an addition to the literature of walking as liberation flips into a damning subversion. Threat, and therefore the experience of walking, is highly contextual.

On one occasion, less than a month after my arrival, I tried to help a man whose wheelchair was stuck in the middle of a crosswalk; he threatened to shoot me in the face, then asked a white pedestrian for help.

Cadogan’s account of the rules required—wide berths, careful backtracks, pre-emptive crossings, no running—for avoiding violence while walking some of the world’s most “developed” cities as a Black man is devastating. As is his portrayal of the consequences awaiting seemingly innocuous lapses. The opposite of carefree strolling and sauntering: This is an oppressive, anxiety-inducing triage of assessments and avoidances, or what his friend calls “a pantomime to avoid the choreography of criminality.” 

If to walk is in some sense to move in step with one’s soul, what damage does this way of walking wreak upon that soul?

Escaping Coronavirus Lockdown Through a Stranger’s Solitary Walks on YouTube (Aaron Gilbreath, Longreads, April 2020)

Last year I returned from Vancouver, Canada, to my native UK. Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t miss Vancouver’s verdant streets, which in summer are shaded beneath green canopies and alive with the aromas and hums of overgrown gardens. So much so, in fact, that I recently found myself walking those summer streets, on a gray February day in England, using Google Street View.

Aaron Gilbreath recalls a comparable, but much deeper, experience. The setting is his dark Portland basement amid the anxious claustrophobia of the COVID-19 lockdown—an unsettling ambience that he thickens using a compounding, diaryesque structure. Pain sometimes cracks through the anxiety. For example, on his young daughter:

She’s the kind of sociable toddler who screams ‘Kids!’ and runs up to groups of them at the playground, at stores, and on the street. Now, she points to photos of kids on the backs of her Highlights magazine and says, ‘Hi friends! What are their names?’ Her world suddenly shrunk so much that images of children on paper and screens will be her sole companions for a while, and that social deprivation makes me weep after she goes to bed.

Against this backdrop, Gilbreath finds unexpected solace in the videos of Rambalac: a YouTuber who records his Tokyo street walks with a GoPro. “He turns his viewers into his eyes, letting them see what they’d see if they were walking with him,” Gilbreath writes. “It’s virtual reality tourism, lacking only touch and smell.” Rambalac’s virtual walks feed Gilbreath’s realization that walking is deeply important to him.

No matter how many times thoughtless pedestrians irritated me by stopping to text in the middle of busy sidewalks or walked in the center instead of to one side, the sight of Tokyo crowds now made me yearn for communion. Pedestrians were like white noise for the spirit: even if you spoke to no one, their presence fed something fundamentally human inside you.

Gilbreath observes—awkwardly, even sacrilegiously—that YouTube walking is, in some ways, superior to real walking; a bit like watching sport on TV. “Navigating Tokyo is a job, and that means you aren’t always able to fully enjoy the view,” he writes, recalling previous travels there. “Rambalac’s camera slows it all down so you can absorb details.” Any sense in fretting about decisions and directions and destinations is removed. Vicarious walking is, in some ways, freer.

These observations open up the fascinating and disquieting question of what role virtual walking—and traveling in general—might play in a future saturated with virtual and augmented reality. COVID demonstrated one dark use case, through which Gilbreath’s piece charts a vicarious and eerie path. I’m braced for the paths to come.

Sam Firman is a freelance writer and editor based in the UK. He writes a newsletter about how we relate to our environments, and how this might help build better systems.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands