Whether cycling or walking, there really is no substitute for moving through a landscape under your own steam. It’s not just about those encounters and cometary intrusions along the way, nor the open-ness of the bodymind to the elements, but, intrinsically, it is the symbiosis of planetary movement: of mind (through wonder fostered by the passing land), of body (through the wander itself), and of planet (through its wandering, its ‘planetting’). It is this continuous harmony that engenders a real sense of religion (from the Latin religio, to bind), and the unity that fastens, religions, every thing together.
In a car, everywhere you go, the whole world is an archipelago, each place an island in a void of travel, discontinuous, dislocated, broken up. The world becomes a noun, vehemently, of places. On a bicycle, or on foot, the paths themselves become verbal interconnectings. They become spokenly open. Places seep into each other as you seep into them. The world becomes a verb, of coming and going, moving and homing.
There can be no greater contrast than that of walking or cycling (on car-free paths) and driving. The bicycle versus the car is perhaps one of the more acute examples of the difference between contemplative (organic) and calculative (mechanistic) thinking, and between an open and a closed system.
Understanding this (and thus feeling it) one can come closer to a reciprocal earthly living that is both compassionate and cultivating in the best possible sense, where one both en-joys the world, and is correspondingly en-joyed by it.
It’s the sort of thing that prompted H.G.Wells to write, well before the full wrath of the motor car had descended upon us, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.
In a car, everywhere you go, the whole world is an archipelago, each place an island in a void of travel, discontinuous, dislocated, broken up. The world becomes a noun, vehemently, of places. On a bicycle, or on foot, the paths themselves become verbal interconnectings. They become spokenly open. Places seep into each other as you seep into them. The world becomes a verb, of coming and going, moving and homing.
There can be no greater contrast than that of walking or cycling (on car-free paths) and driving. The bicycle versus the car is perhaps one of the more acute examples of the difference between contemplative (organic) and calculative (mechanistic) thinking, and between an open and a closed system.
Understanding this (and thus feeling it) one can come closer to a reciprocal earthly living that is both compassionate and cultivating in the best possible sense, where one both en-joys the world, and is correspondingly en-joyed by it.
It’s the sort of thing that prompted H.G.Wells to write, well before the full wrath of the motor car had descended upon us, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.
And which prompted me to think that you'll never find more exquisite and efficient vehicles than the body or the bicycle.
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Central Station, Glasgow
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