Walking, with Writers

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You might think that writing and reading, both of which are sedentary activities, are not naturally compatible with walking. Judging from a bunch of recent books, though, you’d be wrong. Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital (MIT Press) was first published in German in 1929 and is now available for the first time in English, with an introductory essay by Walter Benjamin. The essays in Walking in Berlin can be seen as precursors to the material one might find nowadays in the various city magazines—New York; Toronto Life; Vancouver Magazine—articles that take readers on a guided tour through a particular corner of those cities. In this case, though, we get to explore the streets of Berlin as they were during the Weimar era, a period in which National Socialism was just beginning to establish a foothold; in other words, we get a chance to take a trip through four dimensions: space and time.

Carl Seelig’s Walks with Walser (New Directions) consists of notes made by Seelig following his regular walks with famed Swiss writer Robert Walser, during that period of time (1933 to 1956) when Walser was confined to an asylum following a nervous breakdown. Seelig records Walser’s unique perspective on the world from which he had withdrawn (“He had written his books just as a farmer sows and mows, grafts, feeds the cattle and mucks their stalls. Out of a sense of duty, and in order to earn a little something to eat.”), as well as the minutiae of their time together (“We reach Teufen in three hours and settle down in a butcher shop for veal in mushroom cream sauce, beans, and Rösti potatoes”). The result is a fascinating document that is both insightful and humane.

Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) interweaves two journeys undertaken by John Kaag in the footsteps of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first of these journeys, to “the Swiss peaks above Sils-Maria, where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” took place when Kaag was just nineteen years of age, footloose, and still in the throes of an adolescent intoxication with Nietzsche’s grandiose ideas. Kaag’s second journey in search of Nietzsche is a much more deliberate one, undertaken as an adult academic on leave, accompanied by his second wife and their infant daughter. The adult Kaag lacks the fevered certainties of his youth, and the resulting book illustrates how the literary and philosophical enthusiasms of our younger years are revised and updated—for good and ill—by the more measured second readings of our older selves.