Geoff Nicholson began taking walks around Los Angeles to treat a bout of depression a few years ago.
It worked. So he turned the therapy into an obsessive and entertaining work called “The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy and Literature of Pedestrianism” (Riverhead, $24.95).
The compendium covers great walkers in history and some of Nicholson’s own ambitious perambulations.
It dips into music, movies, religion, photography and something called psychogeography, which boils down to walking without a destination and has roots in the thinking of Frenchman Guy Debord. Nicholson notes that “the French have really hit the conceptual jackpot with the word ‘flaner,'” which “means simultaneously to walk and to not walk.”
Among the great feats of walking, so to speak, was Sebastian Snow’s 8,700-mile (14,000-kilometer) jaunt from Tierra del Fuego to Costa Rica in the 1970s. The British eccentric was excused from military service because army officials thought a sports injury at Eton would keep him from marching.
Arthur Blessitt, whose ministry operates from Heritage Christian Center in Aurora, holds the Guinness record for the longest walk, now 38,102 miles, 1 1/2 times around the world, through 315 countries, carrying a cross weighing 40 pounds. Blessitt is he indeed.
Nicholson also notes the “art walking” of Kim Jones, known as Mudman, starting in L.A. in the 1970s. The performance artist “coats his body in mud, pulls a thick nylon stocking over his head, puts on a foam headdress, and then straps to his back” a large, complicated lattice structure. Besides two 12-hour walks along the 16 miles of Wilshire Boulevard, he has walked in Chicago, London, Rome and Germany.
Mudman sometimes adds things to the mud, Nicholson writes, “and in Rome he didn’t use mud at all, preferring yogurt and cottage cheese.”
Inspired by the “songlines” of Bruce Chatwin — “one of the great ‘sacramental walkers'” — Nicholson walks Madison Avenue in New York from 23rd Street to 138th Street while hearing in his head a song called “Walking Down Madison.”
He also explores the walking theme in music from Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” to Karl- heinz Stockhausen, “who claimed to hear the march of the jackboot in any recognizable time signature.”
He recalls seeing his first Walkman in 1979.
Nicholson’s mini-disquisition on “Paris, Texas,” which he calls “the perfect coming together of music, walking and film,” dissolves into disappointment when Harry Dean Stanton’s purchase of a 1959 Ford Ranchero turns it into a road movie.
How many roads?
A quirky miscellany with which anyone can pass several pleasant hours, “The Lost Art of Walking” boasts an impressive bibliography but sadly lacks an index. This is especially vexing given Nicholson’s meandering, perhaps psychogeographical organization of the material, but mitigated some by a table of contents more detailed than the norm.
In remembering the appearance of the Walkman, Nicholson notes that walking with a portable jukebox can lead to “absurd and unlikely juxtapositions” of tunes and sights.
The observation applies as well to this typical Nicholsonian juxtaposition: “So what’s the answer to the question: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? In an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ called ‘When Grandma Simpson Returns,’ Homer first says it’s eight, and then when he’s told the question is rhetorical he corrects himself and says it’s seven.”
