walknotes.de
Seven walks that became writing
Rousseau, Goethe, Hazlitt, Dickens, Thoreau, Stevenson, Woolf
The first walk is Rousseau’s, over the heights of Ménilmontant in 1776; the last is Woolf’s, to the Strand for a pencil in 1927. Each is drawn below as one line in the gait its text describes: Dickens’s line turns only at street corners, Thoreau’s meanders like a river.
The seven run on as one line, and some of the walkers did read each other: Hazlitt took Rousseau’s novel to an inn at Llangollen, and Stevenson quoted Hazlitt. The drawings are not maps: each follows a phrase from its text, quoted beside it.
The walks
Where a text dates its walk, the year shown is the walk’s; otherwise it is the year the text was printed.
- 1776
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thursday 24 October 1776, until nearly dark.
“puis je fis un détour pour revenir par les mêmes prairies en prenant un autre chemin”then I made a detour, to come back through the same meadows by another path
- 1780
Wandrers Nachtlied
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Probably the evening of 6 September 1780, and a night on the hill.
“auf dem Gickelhahn dem höchsten Berg des Reviers”on the Gickelhahn, the highest mountain of the district
- 1798
On Going a Journey
William Hazlitt. An evening at the inn at Llangollen, 10 April 1798.
“a winding road before me”
- 1860
Night Walks
Charles Dickens. March nights, from half past twelve to sunrise.
“would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the interminable tangle of streets”
- 1862
Walking
Henry David Thoreau. Afternoons, four hours at least.
“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
“no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea”
- 1876
Walking Tours
Robert Louis Stevenson. A day alone, with stops.
“you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you”
- 1927
Street Haunting
Virginia Woolf. A winter evening, on the stroke of six.
“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.”
“to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths”