Ms. Oates and Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Murakami and the Art of Writing and Running

It can hardly be coincidence--although after reading Beckett, I have a curious need to contradict myself, so it could be coincidence, but I tend to think not.

Within the first few pages of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recounts what seems like countless meanderings across Paris, both in ordinary life and as a way of incubating some idea or working out some difficult part of his writing.

from A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. At the head of the Ile de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water's edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading, and in the currents and back water that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish.

 The passage recounts only one of many by-foot journeys through the labyrinth of Paris.

Of this matter, here is what Ms. Oates has to say:

from The Faith of a Writer
Joyce Carol Oates

Writers and poets are famous for loving to be in motion. If not running, hiking; in not hiking, walking. (Walking, even fast, is a poor second to running, as all runner know, that we'll resort to when our knees go, but at least it's an option.) The great English Romantic poets were clearly inspired by their long walks in all weather: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the idyllic Lake District, for instance; Shelley ("I always go until I am stopped and I never am stopped") in his four intense years in Italy.

*****

Both running and writing are highly addictive activities; both are, for me inextricably bound up consciousness. I can't recall a time when I wasn't running, and I can't recall a time when I wasn't writing.

My own experience is somewhat different.  I hate to run--it hurts in every part of my body--lungs, legs, ears, eyes, pancreas.  In fact, it was in running that I first discovered I had a pancreas and that it could hurt.  But I also hate to be still.  My best thinking is done in prowling through the house or wandering the neighborhood, the mall, the streets of the small town to the south of us while waiting for Sam to come out of dance.  At work I'm often seen "aimlessly" wandering the corridors--but people know better than to stop and ask for fear of breaking some slender thread of thought.  I take momentary breaks and move, move, move.

So I can see what these two writers speak of.  And Mr. Murakami--well, I don't have his book to hand, but he's written an entire opus on the matter of running and its relationship to creativity. 

So, it seems that moving and writing and bound up in many people, the same restless energy that compels the imagination forward also compels thoughts--and it is wonderful.