Walking with Music, a pleasure!
Song and Verse
If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music. ~ Nassim Taleb
For My Friend who walks into the sunrise and my man who would not enter the desert with out song, and a very quite Canadian who loves to sing and an English Man with a great eye who is a true wander…
The idea of an aphorism is not necessarily to dictate to others but to place an idea out into the world to be contested with. This is the embodiment followed by Nietzsche, La Rochefoucauld, and Taleb’s calls for this contesting with aphorisms in his introduction for the Bed of Procrustes.
Christopher Hitchens in Mortality discussed the folly of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger by Nietzsche when he commented on Chemotherapy, which left him alive but left him far weaker. As well, Hitchens in his last act proved that there at least one atheist in one fox hole, read Mortality a book he wrote when he waited and reported from the fox hole. He was willing to test an accepted truism, most importantly waterboarding isn’t torture he faced this chestnut with a personal test on his back strapped to a board.
Hitchens actually made a similar distinction to Taleb about reading and music, which I have a tendency to agree with as music takes me out of reading it is one or the other with me, but I am sure that many enjoy both. . Hitchens faced Taleb in debate, and as I am reading his Arguably, I thought it was time to address Taleb’s aphorism on music and its incompatibility with walking, as the voice of Hitchens’ kept asking what the f*ck are you bloody waiting for and since Hitchens would find it is bad form to channel Hitchens, I decided was about time to write this essay.
Taleb misses the mark on listening to music and walking, but he is not completely off the mark and has made me think with his aphorism. I will start with a sympathetic reading of Taleb. Taleb has this as a personal heuristic and as that it is very proper for him but might not be as universal as he implies. Taleb associates walking with the thinking and ideal of flaneur.
Taleb forms ideas, and contemplates them on his walks. He discusses ideas with other thinkers on walks. He would find the distraction of though would corrupt music or music would distract from thought if the two were mixed. I have similar heuristics I don’t listen to music while working because I can’t pay attention. I don’t drink when piano has to be played or math of any kind is on the agenda or I cannot focus. Yet I don’t imply that others have to be bound by my heuristics. Yet these are my heuristics they are personal and necessary for only me or those like me.
Baudelaire identified the flâneur in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863) as the dilettante observer. The flâneur carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. Such a figure can be seen featured in many impressionist paintings.
Taleb wants to reinvigorate the conception of the flaneur, a man who has time for his thoughts, but also for the time to have unnecessary thoughts and ones that can be thought of for their own sake. Although I think Taleb wants to be more philosophical than this and he wants these ideas from time to time to be of merit. (You don’t write Incerto if you didn’t want to get some thoughts off your chest, nor do many non-philosophical types write books of aphorisms.) The ideal of flaneur is being in a position were you have the time to walk aimlessly with both your feet and mind. Taleb has generated much from looking at ideas that at first conception may seem unnecessary.
And Yet … (another book of Hitchens essays) My most memorable walk happened on a day during the pandemic, I had listened to countless amounts of music at home often on head phones in our crowded home. I wanted to listen uninterrupted to the Mets broadcast of Anna Netrbko in recital. My family was unrelenting in distraction leading up to the broadcast. Yet I longed for a live concert in the middle of covid, there was no music halls, there was only a house where everyone was going a bit mad.
I was not short of Netrebko's music during the pandemic. I saw her live at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in recital, before the pandemic. I watch all her operas in HD from the Met and a great deal of Youtube videos during the pandemic, but after forever I wanted to enjoy a live performance and this performance was one I did not want stolen from me.
With the madness of family the only way to be alone with music was to go out for a walk. On a cold day I put on my boots and walked in a pristine white world eyes glued to my cell phone and a nice pair of headphones, I watched this concert live in a vast emptiness. I was alone but I was at a concert. I like being alone with music, this was a true moment of joy. The singing was perfect and every once and a while I would scan the snowy hills and trees and I enjoyed music and being alone. The cold the snow the loneliness were all part of it, WALKING ALONE WAS PART OF IT. This was one of the most important concerts of my life. Walking was part of the je nais quoi of the perfect afternoon and I do feel that that is the closest I will come to being a flaneur.
Yesterday, I had a much simpler walk it was pre spring drabness but there was SUNLIGHT. It was a pleasure to get out by myself and listen to music and be in the sun. Motion of a walk goes well with the music. I listened to a handful of tiny desk concerts, and I had a wonderful time. I stress that walking with music can be done just for the pleasure of life outside.
Many of us have less free times or mean than Taleb has and we have full houses. For many music if we want it has to be stolen. I grew up driving tractors in circles my soul was saved by SONY, the Walkman, The Police and The Talking Heads. Also I did a lot of thinking on the tractor about how to get off and away from the got damn tractor between songs.
I say music is a fine option for a walk, you may not do the deep thinking that Taleb does on a walk, but I get 8 -12 hours of thinking in with a legion of engineers five days a week my thinking often require screens drawing and data. I like to think and experience music. I spend an hour a day on the piano. I like a less focus time just to listen and enjoy. I also spend a great deal of everyday with a piano and at times I need other music, walks facilitate this. I also seem to enjoy the familiar scene more with music.
Contrariwise a few nice poems and a few not so nice dilemmas have been resolved on a serious walk, and I didn’t listen to a thing when I was in the markets of Doha, in the red room at the Tate walking in circles as a gawked at Rothkos or across the beaches of Sardinia.
An yet… walking on a bright day warm day to a with the Stone singing Slave or in the icy cold in listening to Phillip Glass’s Etudes 5 and 6 with a good stride is a fine use of your mind and legs.