The Thinking, Walking Biped, part ten. Walking and Creativity

Many of the most creative minds have had their greatest inspiration by walking out in nature. There did not have to be an actual correspondence of what the mind saw and the act of creativity; it was simply the inspiration of the mind prompted by the overall beauty of nature. There have probably been more poets who have done this than who have not. It was also a common practice among composers. For example, Antonín Dvořák would walk every morning at dawn while jotting down musical ideas. He did this every morning along the Turkey River when he visited Spillville, Iowa in 1893, and then play the organ at the Catholic church. Gustav Mahler was famous for having a composer’s hut in the Alps away from his summer house during the summer when the opera, which he conducted, was not in session. He did not just hide in this hut, but walked on the surrounding forest trails.

 

Sometimes there was actual nature imagery in the music, aside, that is, from the thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (number 6) or in the second part of the Rossini’s William Tell overture. I am thinking again of Mahler. One time, in his childhood, Mahler had been left in the woods alone by a father who forgot about him. His father ran back to rescue him, only to find little Gustav sitting in rapt wonder at the natural world. The memory of this experience did not leave him. According to one documentary, this memory appears at the very beginning of Mahler’s first symphony, where the offstage trumpets represented distant bird calls and the cuckoo call, starting in measure 25 in the oboe, actually was a cuckoo that he heard.

Many other creative people have walked in nature to get at least a general inspiration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo, and even Pierre Curie.

Here is an example of what I am not talking about. The great Roman orator Cicero used the natural world to help him remember his speeches, which he presented without notes. Or so I have read once in a speaker’s handbook long ago. He could remember each portion of his speech, but he sometimes had difficulty remembering which portion would come next. But he was very familiar with his garden walking path. So what he would do was to recite each portion of his speech as he went along the path. Then, while speaking, he would imagine himself walking on the path. Each thing he saw reminded him of which topic was next. This is not an example of walking and creativity, since the topics and the objects did not need to have any real correspondence; it was just Cicero’s memory prop.

An experiment at Stanford in 2014 confirmed that walking enhances creative thinking. This is yet another example of how science confirms what we have known, or think we have known, all along.