Shoe-Leather Rhapsody

My commute is unusual, and different every day. One route takes me past my favorite coffee shop, the jeweler where I bought my wife's engagement ring and the library where I've read away dozens of hours.

Nice way to begin an article, praising a library.

In "The Lost Art of Walking," a slight but amusing treatise on pedestrianism, the novelist Geoff Nicholson describes walking in New York as "a risky activity, a form of combat, a struggle for dominance, sometimes a contact sport." Well, there is that, too.

I assume they both are referring to Manhattan. And, yes, it could be treacherous to walk along Manhattan sidewalks. Yet they should try downtown Flushing one day.

Mr. Nicholson summons the image of Errol Flynn, as boxer James Corbett in the 1942 movie "Gentleman Jim," practicing his fleet footwork by walking down the sidewalk against traffic. Six decades later, New Yorkers have become perhaps less agile but no less aggressive. Of the 70,000 collisions between automobiles and pedestrians in the U.S. each year, Mr. Nicholson notes, fully 15,000 – "a staggering proportion" – take place in New York.

Interesting way of putting it: collisions between automobiles and pedestrians. Collisions? Isn't that a pedestrian being hit by a car? Well, I can see cars being hit be pedestrians in NYC.

If any single idea is central to Mr. Nicholson's ramble through the lore of pedestrianism, it's this idea of walking as a method of discovery – both of the world and one's own thoughts about it.

Interesting to think of the term pedestrian, as both a person who walks and someone common, ordinary.

It is a modern idea, and mostly an urban one. In the 19th century, the Romantic movement helped foster a world-wide cult of pseudospiritual wandering, a communing with nature that would supposedly foster a heightened sense of truth and beauty. But Mr. Nicholson's own pedestrianism finds roots in Baudelaire, who coined the term flâneur to describe a city walker who savors the spectacle of modern life as an ever-changing work of art.

I savor walking in cities. It is a sort of art. I can remember many walks: San Francisco, even LA, Guadalajara, and my own New York. I've taken my own walking tours in NYC.

The Lost Art of Walking
By Geoff Nicholson
(Riverhead, 276 pages, $24.95)