The Socrates Express

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a man of multitudes: philosopher, novelist, composer, essayist, botanist, autodidact, fugitive, political theorist, masochist. Most of all, he was a walker. He walked often and he walked alone. Yes, a stroll with a close friend has its pleasures, as do walking clubs, but at its heart walking is a private act. We walk by ourselves and for ourselves. Freedom is walking’s essence. The freedom to depart and return when we wish, to meander, to, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “follow this way or that, as the freak takes you.”

Rousseau followed his freak. It took him across Europe, from Venice to Paris, Turin to Lyons, and beyond. Rousseau was among the first truly rootless souls, what today we’d call an urban nomad. At home everywhere, and nowhere.

For most of human history, walking was not optional. If you wanted to get anywhere, you had to walk. Today walking is a choice. Rousseau didn’t have as many choices as we do—train travel was not yet invented—but he had some. An extensive network of carriage service crisscrossed Europe. He detested carriage travel and walked whenever he could. “I have never thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself… as in the journeys which I have made alone and on foot,” he said. Walking saved Rousseau’s life. It also killed him.

Rousseau grew up in Geneva, the son of an irascible watchmaker named Isaac. His mother died shortly after his birth, a trauma that haunted him. Young Rousseau regularly teamed up with friends to explore the countryside. “I always went farther than any of them without thinking about my return, unless others thought of it for me,” he recalls in his memoir, The Confessions.

One pleasant spring afternoon, in 1728, Rousseau took a walk that changed the vector of his life. He was sixteen years old, apprenticed to an engraver, a job he despised, and feeling “restless, disconnected with everything and with myself.” A typical sixteen-year-old. He had ventured outside the city. It was getting late. He knew he had to return before the city’s gates closed for the night. Rousseau had missed two curfews in the past, and been beaten by his employer. He dreaded what might happen this time.

He ran frantically, but it was no use. He was too late. Sleeping outside the city walls that night, Rousseau vowed never to return to Geneva. From that day, he led a nomadic life, traveling ceaselessly, and almost always by foot.

Rousseau lived in many cities but was not a city person. He describes his first encounter with Paris, a city most of us associate with beauty and romance, this way: “I saw nothing but dirty stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of clothes, sellers of herb-drinks and old hats.” Then there were the people of Paris, “tiresome” and forever mouthing “stupid witticisms.” No, not a city person.

Not a people person, either. Rousseau was what today we’d call high maintenance. “A difficult friend, a disappointing lover, and an impossible employee,” says author Leo Damrosch in his excellent biography of Rousseau.

Walking enabled Rousseau to escape the eyes of others. He was shy. Severely nearsighted, an insomniac like Marcus, and with a lifelong urinary problem (eventually diagnosed as an enlarged prostate) that required frequent visits to the toilet, he avoided social contact whenever possible. Throughout his life, he imagined people were staring at him. It probably didn’t help that he had an odd compulsion to expose his rear end to strangers. Rousseau was an avowed masochist who enjoyed a good spanking, like the one he received as a delinquent schoolboy. “I found in the pain, in the shame even, a mixture of sensuality that left me desiring more,” he writes in his memoir, among the first to contain such personal, and salacious, details.

Walking was an obvious fit with Rousseau’s philosophy. He advocated a return to nature, and what is more natural than walking? Natural, that is, for most of us.

I am no Rousseau. I am not a child of nature—or even a distant cousin. I do not go camping, nor do I go glamping. My car is not adorned with a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather be fishing.” Ditto hunting, camping (see above), spelunking, kayaking, snorkeling, rock climbing, and bird-watching. I do not own hiking boots. I do not own a sleeping bag. I do not own a crampon. I do own several backpacks, but they are sleek models with names like “city edition” and “urban renegade.”

Mother Nature is something of a nag. She’s constantly reminding me of my core incompetence. I do not know how to pitch a tent or unpitch a tent or do anything involving a tent. I do not know how to navigate using the stars or the sun or any other celestial bodies. My incompetence extends beyond the natural world. I do not know how to change the air filter on my car or talk to my teenage daughter or ease the suffering of an aging parent or do downward dog or sit quietly with my thoughts for more than five seconds without my head exploding.