"Solvitur Ambulando" - It is solved by walking

The long, thick stripes of heavy rain on the window obstructed my view in the shuttle bus from Charles de Gaulle Airport to the Arc de Triomphe on a late April afternoon. I was feeling sick from the slow ride on the highway at rush hour. Maybe I was tired than I thought after the thirteen-hour flight from Tokyo. At the bus terminal near the monument, I hailed a taxi but the driver dropped me off at the wrong street and I had to haul my baggage for a couple of blocks to my hotel in the drizzle.

 

After unpacking my things in the small hotel room and making sure I had everything in order for the meeting on the next day, I looked out my window facing the Seine. A rainbow had appeared above the Louvre in the evening twilight. I grabbed my bag in which I carried a map of the city, a Moleskine notebook that was my guidebook, a digital camera, and went out for my first walk of this stay.

 

* * *

 

I had visited Paris twice in the past and although I agreed it was an impressive city, I never felt affection towards it. To me, Paris seemed like an actress whose outstanding beauty radiated a proud and unapproachable aura.

 

While preparing for my third visit, I wondered why I had felt this way towards the city. I recalled my travels to other cities; for example in Berlin, where I went to in 2001, I had visited and photographed the few and scattered remains of the Wall in my spare time. With this personal assignment and the numerous business appointments I kept, I had covered much of Berlin by foot and it became one of my favorite cities in the world.

 

It dawned on me that in the case of Paris, I never really had the opportunity to walk its streets.

 

In prior to this trip, I had been reading an anthology of travel essays by the British author Bruce Chatwin, who introduced me to another quality of walking. In a chapter dedicated to the German film director Werner Herzog, Chatwin wrote:

 

"He [Herzog] was also the only person with whom I could have a one-to-one conversation on what I would call the sacramental aspect of walking. He and I share a belief that walking is not simply therapeutic for oneself but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills. He sums up his position in a stern pronouncement: 'Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin."

- Bruce Chatwin, "Werner Herzog in Ghana," What Am I Doing Here.

This time, I vowed to myself, I would walk the streets of Paris as much as I could.

 

The essential items for this trip were a pair of sensible shoes, a slim but useful map called Paris Pratique, and my pocket size Moleskine notebook. Before leaving, I wrote down in it information on sites of interest, shops, and restaurants - including their addresses, telephone numbers, hours of operations, nearest stations – that I had found from a guidebook, plus useful nouns and phrases in French. Printouts from the web were also pasted on its pages. It became a compact, lightweight, and discreet guidebook that would be suitable for walking long hours in a city where I was a visitor. Once I arrived in Paris, I stored into the back pocket of the notebook a set of ten tickets for the metropolitan transportation system known as carnets, receipts, and a color photocopy of a page from my passport. The guidebook also became a travel journal that I kept during my stay whenever I sat down in a café. The words I wrote in it confirmed that I was now having an intimate relationship with the city through my walks.

 

* * *

 

One of the places I had wanted to visit was Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie in the 6th arrondissement, the street where Bruce Chatwin used to buy his carnets moleskines – the ancestor of the Moleskine notebook - in Paris at a stationer that no longer exists. The episode of him ordering a hundred notebooks at the stationer is described in his book titled The Songlines and in the small pamphlet that comes with each Moleskine notebook. To me, as a fan of Chatwin’s books and of the notebook, a visit to this street was a pilgrimage.

 

Although it was a lively street, it was narrower than I had imagined and I was surprised to see that it even had a sleazy appearance. On one side of the street there was a building with a sign claiming it to be a hotel but it looked more like a cheap apartment house; on the other side there were poorly lit shops with grimy windows. I walked down the street slowly, trying to guess where the stationer must have been. I noticed that as I walked southward towards the Odeon metro station, the atmosphere of the street gradually changed - there were shops with well-kept showcases and a four-star hotel facing a Timberland store. At the end of the street there was even a deluxe brasserie. I could not find any trace where the stationer must have been; yet I was happy to have completed this walk.

 

After my return to Tokyo, I found the following episode recounted by British writer Paddy Leigh Fermor in a biography of Chatwin:

 

"On one of their walks, Leigh Fermor told him the Latin expression solvitur ambulando - it is solved by walking - "and immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook. Everything was useful to him. He piled it into a great sack and when alone winnowed and used it when most apposite, which is a writer should do."

- Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin, Chapter XXXIII.

 

Perhaps much, if not all, can be solved by the activity that Bruce Chatwin described as being poetic - along with the process of writing - just like it successfully transformed the negative into the positive in my mind.

"Solvitur Ambulando - It is solved by walking"
by Tatsuo Fukutomi

A MOLESKINE NOTES ESSAY SERIES ENTRY

Image: "Rue de l'ancienne Comédie"
Courtesy of the author.