Of Walks and Walking Tours: An Attempt to Find a Philosophy and a Creed
1914
Of Walks and Walking Tours: An Attempt to Find a Philosophy and a Creed
1914
At the dawn of the automobile age, when golf was rapidly capturing the English countryside and threatening to displace the country walk altogether, Arnold Haultain sat down to write a small, urgent defense of aimless wandering. This is not a guidebook or travelogue, but something rarer: a philosophical meditation on walking as a way of being. Haultain argues that the true walk must be without aim, without destination, without the tyranny of a goal. Only then can we become receptive to nature's quiet lessons. Through personal recollections of walks across England and India, and through his meditations on historical figures who found wisdom in wandering, Haultain constructs an eloquent case for the disappearing art of purposeless movement. The book wrestles frankly with a curious paradox: that nature's deepest truths are felt rather than reasoned, yet we must use the blunt instrument of language to convey them. What makes this slender essay endure is its gentle insistence that in an age of accelerating distraction, sometimes the most radical thing we can do is simply step outside and walk nowhere in particular.
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“Nature's lessons are hard to learn. Harder still is it to translate Nature's lessons to others. Beside, the appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things ... by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion. If, in these pages, there are scattered speculations semi-mystical, semi-intelligible, perhaps even transcending the boundaries of rigid logic, I must simply aver that i put in writing that only which was given me to say.””
— Arnold Haultain
“Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great paean of Being that Nature chants ... Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines - these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life ... Alas, that so fear hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!””
— Arnold Haultain
“...those who think their God ... has nowhere so plainly shown himself as in his works, will seek in the face and lineaments of Nature that consoling smile which every lonely soul so miserably craves ... betake thee to the fields; betake thee to the woods ... thou shalt be comforted ... Lay thy tired head on Nature's breast ... always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee ...””
— Arnold Haultain
