One Snake, Two Feet, and the Freedom of Walking

The first punishment God meted out, according to the Bible, was not the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Before that, God punished the serpent for tempting Eve, declaring that ‘upon thy belly shalt thou go’. In other words, the snake had to crawl upon the ground and was deprived of the freedom of walking.

It feels to me like the biggest punishment of the lockdown. The inability to stretch the legs properly, to take some fresh air and go on an extended walk. I have felt its absence keenly. And it made me think about what walking means within our culture.

For centuries, walking was associated with pilgrimages. The Camino de Santiago in Spain remains famous and attracts thousands of pilgrims each year. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has at its heart, a pilgrimage. Dante’s La Divina Commedia was composed in the Tuscan hills, the poet famously echoing the meaure of his walk in the precise rhythms of his poem. 

Those familiar with poetry will know that rhythm is traditionally defined by ‘feet’. The most common rhythm in English is the ‘iamb’, which comprises one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: de-dum, de-dum. Interestingly this same rhythm approximates the beat of our hearts – lub-dub, lub-dub, the emphasis falling on the second beat or pulse.

If you’ve ever heard anyone walking down the stairs, you will notice again that the stress tends to fall on the second, heavier step. We all tend to have one leg slightly longer than the other. That’s why, if left walking long enough in a desert, we would tend to walk in a full circle.

The walk in the country has long been an emblem of leisure, and a stimulus for thought, the most famous example being Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. In cities, it was seen as dangerous to walk at night. Charles Dickens would go for a walk in the evening, with his lantern, looking for inspiration for his novels on London’s streets. 

And when arcades or galleries, like the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan, started to appear in nineteenth century cities, it generated a fashion for window shopping - less a walk, perhaps, than a dandyish stroll, which led to the habit of passeggiata. Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s novel marvellously uses her fingers on a map to walk around the streets of Paris.

Since then we’ve had the catwalk, where models throw their shoulders back and walk with one foot directly in front of the other. We’ve had space walks, moon walks, and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. These days, with a pedometer app, you can count the number of steps you take every day. 

A walk that illustrates the more extreme nature of the human spirit is that undertaken by Philippe Petit on 7 August 1974, on a tightrope strung between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. I’d recommend the incredible documentary, Man on Wire, that chronicles this feat, and tells the amazing story of how it was performed.

It’s clear that walking is associated with freedom. It’s an index of human civilisation. And to be deprived of this right is, therefore – albeit for good reason – to be deprived of one of the basic liberties and pleasures of human life. Recently dogs have enjoyed more rights to walk than human beings in Milan.  

We look forward fervently to seeing our students walk through the school gate again. It will be a marvellous thing, an ordinary miracle following months of lockdown. I really hope it won’t be too long.

Personally, I can’t wait to be able to walk freely again (the last couple of days were wonderful in this respect), and in doing so to escape the odium of God’s first punishment. And so, with a final step, my thoughts complete a full circle, and end where they began.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO