Walking

Walking is one of the main gaits of terrestrial locomotion among legged animals and humans.

Quotes

• Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional. If you want to go faster, then don’t walk, do something else: drive, slide or fly. Don’t walk. And when you are walking, there is only one sort of performance that counts: the brilliance of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.
  Once on his feet, though, man does not stay where he is.
  • Chapter 1: Walking Is Not a Sport. In: Gros, Frédéric; Howe, John (trans.). 2014. A philosophy of walking. London; New York: Verso. ISBN 978-1-78168-270-8. (2014 English translation by John Howe, from the original 2008 French book)

• Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.
  • Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

See also

• Running
• Frédéric Gros
• Rebecca Solnit