The Footpath Way: An Anthology for Walkers

There is a particular silence that belongs to walking. It is not the silence of stillness but of movement through space, a silence in which thought can finally hear itself. This anthology gathers that silence from fifteen of the greatest walkers in English literature: poets, philosophers, and novelists who understood that putting one foot in front of another is not merely locomotion but a way of being in the world. Hilaire Belloc opens with his own meditation on the footpath, and the collection proceeds through wanderers who found in walking what they could find nowhere else. Whitman celebrates the democratic joy of the open road; Thoreau finds philosophy in every country mile; Hazlitt writes that the pleasure of walking is the pleasure of thinking. Here too are Dickens wandering the London streets, Wordsworth in the Lake District, Stevenson on his romps through France. They knew what we have forgotten: that the rhythm of walking is also the rhythm of thought, and that the path is as much within as without. For anyone who has ever walked not merely to arrive but to become, this book is a companion for the road.