Without free access to our city’s tree-lined streets and architectural wonders, New York City walkers find themselves stuck in tiny apartments and cluttered offices. When we go out, the dominance of cars, scooters and bikes traps us in public, triggering skirmishes, dodging and omnipresent jaw clenching. Today, it too often feels like crossing the street at the “Walk” light is not so much a right as a pleading negotiation – as if my freedom of movement is begrudgingly and charitably permitted by monsters of two bright-eyed tons moving forward impatiently. , irritated at having given up precious seconds.
New York today seems like a universe apart from the city traveled by the writers I love. One might wonder what kind of literature they would make here now, in a city that seems to envelop us in restrictive ambient anxiety rather than lyrical inspiration – and in ever more innovative and disruptive ways.
A city that no longer welcomes wandering no longer welcomes wondering, too, and a stroller without freedom falls into a sort of zombified routine. I’ve started limiting my walks outside, and even quick trips to the grocery store, gym, and local coffee shop can feel like obstacle courses with dangerous stakes. Because free walking in the city has become so crowded, so subordinated to the expediency of wheels, I have found my thoughts more prone to distraction, tautology, and the disorder of reflective associations. Now I pace around my apartment thinking about my essays, but the unexpected connections between ideas are diminishing – the rewards of spontaneous tangents pushed toward discovery through discursive movement. My inner voice has quieted, my inner life has dulled, while outside, the roar of engines and the clamor of discord are louder than ever.
Perhaps the most philosophically valuable aspect of strolling is the extent to which it returns us to an analog habitat. If we’re collectively prone to drowning out our inner voices with TV shows, dating apps, online screeds, and looping videos, a long walk outside doesn’t just serve to politely snatch us away from tiny rooms and tiny screens . It also allows the inner voice to come out of sleep, engage with itself and thus the mind to find itself. Nietzsche glorified ideas “earned by walking” precisely because they arise from this redemptive self-consciousness.
In Baudelaire’s “A Lost Halo,” an angelic poet anxiously crosses a busy boulevard. He trips and falls, and his halo slips off his head and onto the muddy street. He abandons it, fearing horses and carriages, but he finds a positive side in the confiscation: “Now I can live incognito,” he says, “do bad things and indulge in vulgar behavior like the common mortals.” In this magical city, we certainly cannot afford to abandon our individual responsibilities, to give in to anarchy, to leave our halos in the mud. Our freedom, our epiphanies and our inner life are at stake.
