Scatterbrain: a letter from the Peripatos

Walking; Werner Herzog, David Shields, the Chaplin Twins, and the falsity of memory (and memoirs)

These shoes are made for walking

The grey British spring has arrived, and I’ve been taking early morning walks. I wake up at 5:45am, get changed quickly, drink a glass of water, brush my teeth, leave the house and head in whichever direction I fancy, to walk briskly for an hour. This is a futile attempt to fend off old age and death but I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy my walks. Werner Herzog, in his On Walking in Ice: Munich–Paris, 23 November—14 December 1974 writes that “the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” I’m not so much travelling as just walking about for an hour or so, but I have to agree that the world does take on a deeper meaning when you glide through it peripatetically.

Since I moved to London twenty-two years ago, I’ve walked weekly ten times what a person walks in Argentina in a year. Yes, London is a humongous urban mess that sprawls horizontally until the end of the world, and any activity here demands a walk of some kind — but the main issue is t…