WILL AND VOLITION

“The desert holds many of these dry lake beds or playas, washed long ago or annually to a surface as flat and inviting as a dance floor when dry. These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor, like in the blues. This one, near Joshua Tree National Park, in southeastern California’s Mojave Desert, was occasionally a lake bed but mostly a pure plain of cracked dust in which nothing grew. To me, these big spaces mean freedom, freedom for the unconscious activity of the body and the conscious activity of the mind, places where walking hits a steady beat that seems to be the pulse of time itself.”

“…while his former countrywoman Doris Lessing called the second volume of her memoirs Walking in the Shade, and then there’s Kierkegaard’s Steps on Life’s Way or the literary theorist Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, in which he describes reading a book as wandering in a forest.”

Last Sunday I took a Walk toward highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr. Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s in conversation with Coleridge—I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable—I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for nearly two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, poetry— on Poetical Sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids— Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A Ghost story (John Keats).

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Excerpts from:

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A history of walking. Penguin, 2001.