Walkers

W.'s always had a messianic faith in the figure of the walker. No one is more annoyed than he at the channeling which forces the pedestrian through a predetermined route. For this reason, W. has always hated airports. There's only ever one direction in an aiport, he says. And if you're allowed to wander away, it is only to buy things from innumerable shops. Doesn't Newcastle airport channel every traveller through a shop floor? It scandalises him, W. says. He wants to knock every bottle of perfume from the rack. He wants to smash every overpriced bottle of wine. But here, today, in the meadows? Every direction is available to us, he notes. We can travel in whatever way we like.

Mandelstam was a great walker, of course. He wrote poems in his head and then went home to write them. And when he had to destroy them, his wife had to carry them in her head. A precious cargo. He knew I was a man of culture when he saw Hope Against Hope on my bookshelf. It didn't matter that I hadn't read it, or had no idea, really, of what it contained. The title itself excited me. The title, and the myth of Mandelstam, who died so dreadfully. Hadn't I carried a book of Mandelstam's poems on my Greek adventure?, W. say. Wasn't it the last book I was ever going to read?

Ah, but what sense could we have of Mandelstam? He's beyond us! Far beyond! Poetry mattered then. It mattered that it was committed to memory. It mattered that it wasn't forgotten. And now? It doesn't matter, and we, who fancy that we love poetry, though we really only love the myth of poetry, the myth of the world-historical importance of poetry, are even more irrelevant.

There's Walser, too, the patron saint of walkers. Walser walking in the Swiss Alps. Walker who'd long since devoted his time to being mad, rather than writing: he knew his priorities. He was mad, and the mad walked. And one day – 60 years ago – they found him dead in the snow. He'd walked his way to death. Which is to say, says W., he'd met death on his own terms, far from his mental asylum. And that's exactly his point, W. says. The walker meets the world on his own terms. The walker – the slow walker – meets the world according to his measure, W. says.

Ah, if only we were as wise as Walser, which is to say, as mad as Walser. If only we understood our duty is to walk, not to write, merely to walk and not to think. To give up thinking! To give up writing! To give up our reading, which is really only the shadow of reading, the search for the world-historical importance reading once had. But we go on, don't we? We collect our books. We surround ourselves with them, the names of old Europe, when we should have been walking, just that, all along.