WalksIt can easily be believed in my wanderings through America that I took good care to have time to go for a walk of some sort every day. Yes, I have "gone for walks" in every state in the Union, except those of South Dakota, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Washington and Utah!... (Autobiography)I can do no better than to quote part of the conclusion of Mark Boseley's excellent Essay Walking in the Creative Life of John Cowper Powys: For few people can walking have played such a central part in their lives as for John Cowper Powys. Wordsworth could refrain from a walk, but Powys could not. Towards the latter half of the nineteeth century walking had become a recreation of the upper-classes. Powys would seem to fit into that category. He did not regard walking as work, yet even a cursory glance at Powys's life reveals that walking for him was so much more than recreation and when seen in the light of Wallace's discovery of peripatetic its true role and significance become immediately clearer. Walking for Powys was therapeutic, both physically and mentally. It enabled him to cope with the pressures and difficulties of life since it allowed him to enjoy the ordinary pleasures each day had to offer, its sensations, even ecstasies, especially when met with in 'humanized Nature'. What is more, through these sensations, he built up layer upon layer of associative memories that he felt linked him to his relations, to his ancestors and indeed to the whole of creation, past and present.Mark Boseley, Walking in the Creative Life of John Cowper Powys, The Triumph of the Peripatetic Mode, 2001, Mälardalens Högskola, Sweden. See also Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteeth Century, 1993, Oxford; Clarendon, 1994 |
|||
| |||
|