Introduction

Summary

This book begins with walking, thinking about walking, walking as thinking, just walking. In part a response to what I perceived to be the incompleteness of Romantic accounts of aesthetic experience and pleasure, it began by considering decidedly un-Romantic walking: huddling in Edinburgh doorways to avoid creditors, attempting to hold panic at bay while recognizing you’re lost in the dark in dangerous terrain, suddenly recognizing that you’ve chosen the ‘wrong’ side of Scafell to descend and may die, feeling untethered by the experience of moving house, of ‘flitting’. Such experiences put pressure on ideas of aesthetic pleasure: are they pre-aesthetic, awaiting some Burkean ‘safe place’ in which to be recuperated, or are they simply unorganized, or even unorganizable – verging on what Burke calls the ‘simply terrible’? I began this project looking for the former, hoping to deploy what I was calling experiential criticism to assemble a series of fraught events, represented in a variety of genres, which escaped the recuperative logic of received aesthetic categories.