I am a compulsive walker. Walking has always been my favorite hobby. The habit that allows me to catch my breath a bit, meditate on problems and sometimes — if I am very lucky — even imagine solutions. It would be incredibly trite, however, to devote this brief reflection to the benefits of walking (in an age when motorization and sedentariness have made us increasingly detached from this habit). As we read a little bit everywhere, walking even an hour a day significantly reduces the risk of heart attack, lowers blood cholesterol, improves the performance of the cardiovascular system, boosts immune defenses, improves cognitive activities, normalizes blood pressure, and reduces anxiety or depression by activating a more consonant production of the cortisol hormone (the one responsible for stress). Great, isn't it? Good. However, I do not walk for any of these reasons. I walk because I enjoy it. Because it gives me the comforting feeling that I’m living in my own space and time, that I have control over the phenomena around me, and thus, in a nutshell, that I have a choice. It is like a life preserver that keeps me well anchored to my certainties, preventing me from ending up adrift and letting the world, simply, “happen to me.” Living in a modern city and working at the fast pace that society demands is not easy. Anyone who approaches meditative disciplines, such as Mindfulness, soon learns that the key to serenity inevitably comes through breathing and awareness of our corporeality. And perhaps this is precisely why walking gives me a deep sense of fulfillment. Because as I do it (strictly without listening to music or isolating myself in any way from reality) I perceive my body in its concreteness. I feel it living. But who am I? What, in the end, is this container that envelops my consciousness and gives meaning to what I call my identity?
My name is Lorenzo, I am twenty-nine years old and I live in Florence (Italy). I come from a bilingual family (Italian mother, German father), was born in South Tyrol and grew up in Tuscany. I studied in Florence and Venice, moved fourteen times, and now, after losing my third job in a little over a year, I am going to move for the fifteenth. I live to write and I write to live. Any other activity I engage in — apart from walking — is aimed at keeping me alive just enough to keep writing. I am the inverted embodiment of the so-called hindsight bias (the cognitive process that leads us to overestimate, in retrospect, our real understanding of past events): it seems to me, in all honesty, that I almost never understood anything, of what was happening around me. I almost always acted by trial and error, striving to ignore the long-term consequences of my choices and condemning myself to an eternal present. A present that expands particularly conspicuously just when I indulge in a healthy walk. On the other hand, what do I have to lose? If I look in the mirror and observe the primate that I am, I can only marvel that I have come this far. I am but the descendant of millions of human beings who preceded me and who, in most cases, survived only long enough to pass on to their offspring that same genome that I now, indolent postmodern lazybones, jealously preserve in my DNA. Think about it, please. Try to think for a moment about the absurdity of our very being here. Our species has existed for approximately 300,000 years. We evolved and developed in an area of East Africa and from there, through the famous process called “Out of Africa,” we have moved, very slowly, to the other continents of the globe. Since we have developed as a species, an estimated 120 billion individuals have existed. Today the living human population is about 7.6 billion. Calculating the exact number of people who have existed over the entire span of history is certainly problematic (as well as quite futile). But it is an exercise that could perhaps help us put our own lives in a somewhat different perspective.
Each of us has or has had 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents and so on. But it would be a mistake to believe that such a series continues backward until it is lost in infinity. Such a relationship is in fact not exponential. At some point, inevitably, we reach a level where ancestors shared between one individual and another are increasingly common. In 1800 the human population was about 1 billion. In 1650 it was roughly half that. Around 8,000 B.C. (when our species adopted agriculture), the world population apparently did not exceed 5 million individuals. In our multi-thousand-year history, according to many scholars, there would also have been several genetic “bottlenecks,” moments of dramatic criticality that, on occasion, would even have threatened the very survival of the genus homo on Earth. The most serious that has ever been hypothesized is the one that disrupted ancient hominids between 930,000 and 810,000 years ago. According to one study, which sequenced the genomes of 3,154 people from several areas around the world, a catastrophic event — perhaps an apocalyptic drought — occurred at the end of the Lower Pleistocene, wiped out 98 percent of the approximately 100,000 proto-humanoids that inhabited the planet at the time. At that time, hominids with reproductive capabilities are estimated to have reached the shocking number of 1,280. Humanity would take more than 1,000 centuries, then, to return to a population of 30,000 individuals. Not to mention that the existence of our ancestors, for the vast majority of history, has been nothing short of brutal. It is estimated that, for almost the entire course of our evolution, the average life expectancy was only 10 years. In the Iron Age, because of inevitable infant mortality, it must have averaged 12 years. We are talking about 80 live births per 1,000 people. Our genome — and perhaps even our epigenome — holds the demeaning mystery of an endless carnage: hundreds of thousands of years of raw, violent existences destined for a very early demise. Billions of naked, bipedal apes destined to die in very early infancy, before even being able to fully express their evolutionary baggage consisting, in the first instance, of a brain weighing almost a pound and a half, about 1200 cm³ in size and containing up to 86 ± 8 billion neurons. And, secondly, by the characteristic upright posture, with its two-footed gait, which undoubtedly favored the development of the cranial case but also, it must be said, the gluttons of prehistoric predators such as the macairod, a lion-sized felid which, for much of the Pleistocene, preyed on us with disarming ease.
Here. Seeing things in this perspective, one cannot help but feel a sense of vertigo, at the mere idea of our being here and our being now. Yet, even upon reflection, it proves difficult to suck it up, to self-deceive by telling ourselves that we are fortunate to have been born millennia after the end of the Pleistocene carnivorous mega-fauna. The traces and legacies of this past of ours are all there, clearly visible through the mirror I myself use to reflect on this issue. As I stand on my own two feet feeling anguish about a world that seems to me too fast, too confusing and too saturated with information. Rebecca Solnit, in her famous “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” (2001), observes that
“for much of human history, all land transportation depended on a single means of propulsion: feet. Whether the traveler relied on his own extremities or those of another creature, the disadvantages were the same: low cruising speed, exposure to the elements, and the need to stop for refreshment and rest. But on September 15, 1830, the motive power of the foot began its long descent into obsolescence. To the sound of a brass band, a million Englishmen gathered between Liverpool and Manchester to witness the opening of the first totally steam-powered railway. Despite the death of a member of Parliament run over by the train at the opening ceremony [sic!], the Liverpool-Manchester line promoted the race to rail around the world.”
The demise of the walking civilization, however, has certainly not solved our problems. On the contrary, Solnit again observes, mechanized transportation has only produced more mutated expectations than leisure time: just as the greater speed of industrial production has not decreased the hours of work (but only increased humanity's production coefficient), the greater speed of transportation has only connected us across larger spaces. If a century ago my great-great-grandfather Hermann, born in 1900 and destined to fight in both World War I and World War II, took two hours to walk to the town of Speyer from his village (7 kilometers), today it will take me as long to drive from my home to where I work, because perhaps the two places are 50, if not 80, kilometers apart. Both Rebecca Solnit and I agree that moving on foot can alleviate modern tedium, as also that awareness of one's own corporeality can ensure a healthier relationship with one's expectations and ambitions. Likewise, however, I think that maintaining a broader perspective on our issues, a firm resolve to keep our substantial infimity in mind, can also benefit.
Last year, in another article in which I reflected on the urgency of reviving the Neoist International, I started from a fact quoted by the famous Polish historian Karol Modzelewski (1937-2019): the ancient Saxons, in order to keep their complex family trees in mind and not forget them, used a curious system of “bodily topography” in which, starting from the tips of the fingers of the hand and reaching up to the shoulders, they used their own offshoots as symbols. The first phalanx of the right index finger could correspond to the current maternal generation, while that of the left index finger to the current paternal generation. Moving up the arms, therefore, one would arrive at the progenitors. Having become nomadic, Modzelewski's “barbarian” could hold on to his memory (the bearer of identity) precisely because of this sort of bodily topography, while his homeland ended up becoming Everywhere. In the dispersive post-modern periphery, the recovery of a dérive in the neoist sense, of a psychogeography of space (which can take into account the new “topographies of the body”) thus becomes an interesting perspective. Walking to know oneself, walking to know the world, and walking to remember where one has come from: here, perhaps, are my ingredients for an increasingly effective and joyful iter aeternum...
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