Spring is here, but, despite its suggestive name, March is not quite time to go off on a new Long Walk. It is, however, the perfect time to get into the spirit with some inspirational reading!
I popped into my favourite (international) bookstore in Siena yesterday and picked up a copy of the new book by writer, philosopher, guide and wayfarer Luigi Nacci.
Non mancherò la strada is a collection of articles - notes - essays - poems - etc. written over the past decade or so and finally put together into a volume this year. I enjoyed Luigi Nacci's previous books, Viandanza and Alzati e cammina, and his philosophy of walking continues to resonate with me as it is expressed in this new collection of writings. Unfortunately none of this author's books are available in English, so far, so I have attempted my own rather liberal translation of his "Ten Commandments of the Wayfarer", and I don't think I will be violating any copyright laws if I publish it here, seeing as the Italian original of this part of the text is freely available on the publisher's website; so if you would rather read the Ten Commandments in Italian, click here!
Before I begin I should mention one difficulty in translating Italian, Spanish or French texts about Long Walks: there is no English equivalent to the word cammino/camino/chemin. The word cammino comes from the verb camminare, which means to walk, but a lot of what Luigi Nacci has to say is about the difference between walking and going on a Long Walk, to use the term I have adopted in this blog.
English speakers who have walked a Camino de Santiago continue to use the Spanish word camino to refer to these routes, and by extension to all pilgrimage routes, or long-distance walking routes. To those who have walked a pilgrimage route, it will be clear that a camino is completely different from a hike, or even a trail; it is a uniquely European phenomenon combining aspects of culture, nature, history, religion, philosophy, and hospitality with unique physical challenges.... In any case, in my translation I have chosen to use the term Long Walks, in line with the title of this blog!
Luckily there is a perfectly good English word to translate another of Luigi Nacci's favourite terms. Though he has walked thousands - probably tens of thousands, in fact - of kilometres on the pilgrimage routes of Europe, Luigi Nacci does not call himself a pilgrim. He refuses to take part in discussions about who is or is not a "real pilgrim", but prefers to use the all-inclusive term viandante, which translates into a good old English word that has fallen into disuse lately: wayfarer.
And so here are Luigi Nacci's
Ten commandments of the wayfarer
- We don’t like to go out for walks.We do it sometimes, and it makes us feel better, physically, but it doesn’t make us feel joy. If joy is too strong a word, we might put it like this: going out for a walk doesn’t make us feel anything powerful enough to cause us to question the way we live our lives. We know it takes several days, or even weeks, for this to happen.
- We
may not take it kindly if someone wishes us “a nice walk”. People go out for a
walk in their spare time to get some fresh air, to get an ice cream, or to
pass the time before dinner. Going for a walk fits into that model of life
that may be summed up in the routine home-work-sports&leisure-home. We
suffer because we can feel this routine squeezing us more and more tightly. We may
go out for a walk, sometimes, but we never consider this experience comparable
to a Long Walk (cammino).
- We
have no interest in training, competition, or chronometers. If we climb the same
mountain more than once, we don’t keep track of how long it took us each time. We are
not like those people who are obsessed with elevation gain. What we do remember
about the paths we have walked on more than once is the trees, the
flowers, the animal tracks, the inns along the way, the faces of the
people we met there, the faces of those who were unable to come with us.
- We
do travel by car, and by public transport, sometimes. And yet people are
always asking us, “did you walk here?” Some people imagine you must be constantly on
the move, seeing you as a sort of apostle, as a pioneer, or as an unidentified
object; others make fun of you before your face, calling you the village
idiot, a misfit, some kind of Forrest Gump. When you tell them you
actually own a car, a motorcycle, or a bus pass, they don’t understand. “But
that’s cheating,” they think. As if it were all a game!
- We’re
tired of being tourists. We have less and less interest in
travelling to see the cathedrals, historic sites, museums and parks of the world. Even
if we pick up a map at the tourist office and walk from one to another of those places, we still feel something is missing. We have
walked, a lot, but we haven’t been on a Long Walk. It is very hard to explain
this to the people we love. And above all, it is very hard to explain that
we don’t want to go “on vacation”. The word “vacation” comes from the same
root as “vacant”, or “vacuum”: it has to do with emptiness. While wayfaring is all about fullness.
- We
feel a real urge to be outside, every day, especially when Spring is in
the air. A desire to have no commitments, no schedule to keep to, no queues
to stand in, no forms to fill out, no money to handle, no shopping to do, no
stuff to buy (when we do buy something, we feel guilty about it). This
desire for freedom pervades every cell of our bodies. We feel as if we are in a cage; and if we go out walking for a few hours, if we go on a
hike, we feel as if we have been pacing back and forth in our cage.
- We are
attracted to the exceptional. We go in search of wonder. We have felt
wonder on our Long Walks, and we have become addicted to it. Not the view from the
top of the mountain; if that were it, a day hike would be enough to bring
about the same feeling. (We don’t even like the word “hike”.) Our
lives on our Long Walks were truly exceptional and full of wonder: the unpredictability
of it. Not knowing what might happen next. The realisation that the world lay before us
like an open book. There, we struggled to tame the unknown; here, we are
forced to ignore the domestic in order to survive. When we were surrounded
by the exceptional, we ourselves became exceptional; it was not walking that
made this possible for us, but the condition of being a wayfarer.
- We don’t
keep up with the news much any more. Crime, gossip, politics: we don’t want
to hear it. It makes us indignant, it makes us angry, it causes us pain to
see all that violence and injustice. On our Long Walks, we got used to sharing
our bread, to being accepted, not judging people by how they looked, not being
afraid of people. We felt that we had become better people. And it was not
walking that did this for us, but the condition of being a wayfarer.
- We
are daydreamers. We
daydream all the time. About giving up our jobs, our homes, all our
commitments. Some of us might even dream of leaving behind the people that
we love. Of putting on our backpacks and disappearing into another life. But
we cannot talk about these dreams, except with other daydreamers. No-one else understands them. And when we cannot talk about our dreams, we are
overcome by frustration. Walking does not placate these dreams; only planning
another Long Walk can temporarily quell our feelings of restlessness.
- We
are wayfarers, not walkers. We are creatures of the way, of the open
road, of the crossroads, the bends in the road, the rest stops. And we do
not cease to be so when we stop walking. Because you never really come back
from a Long Walk. We still haven’t come back from our first Long Walk; a part
of us is still out there, hanging from a branch or stuck in the bark of a
tree somewhere along the trail. We intuitively feel, without being able to
express it rationally, that we are a part of this thing called “wayfaring”:
a new life, a threshold, a threshold on the threshold, another dimension in
which our daydreams really do come true. There are not many of us; we are
a small minority. We can recognise one another right away. We pass each
other notes under our desks. We think of each other, in silence. We call
our backpacks by name. And we don’t like lists of ten commandments.
