Motion as Life

Motion as Life is the narrator’s defense of movement against the ideal of stillness. Set against Bishop Hall’s reading of a biblical imprecation as a wish that the Lord’s enemies should be kept perpetually rolling about, the narrator makes restlessness a source of life and joy. Yet the travel narrative repeatedly tests that conviction against the delays, costs, and bodily discomfort of getting anywhere: motion is an exhilarating principle, not an effortless escape from material limits.

The Wheel and Its Rival Readings

The argument begins with the command to make the enemies of the Lord like a wheel. Bishop Hall treats it as a bitter sarcasm and one of David’s severest imprecations: to be always rolling about is to be condemned to unquietness. By the same analogy, rest approaches heaven. The narrator draws the contrast through Hall’s corpulence and his own thinness, making their different bodily constitutions part of the dispute over whether movement is a blessing or a burden.

The narrator’s answer reverses the moral charge of the wheel. So much motion, he insists, means so much life and joy; standing still, or advancing only slowly, means death and the devil. Rather than leave the claim at the level of maxim, he turns it into a burst of action: the world is asleep, but the horses are to be brought out, the wheels greased, the mail tied on, and a nail driven into the moulding. The urgent catalogue makes the argument kinetic. Its speaker does not merely praise motion; he tries to set the journey moving at once.

The shape of the wheel matters to the joke. The wheel in Hall’s curse, the narrator argues, should be a post-chaise wheel, while his own wheel should be a cartwheel, groaning through one revolution only once in an age. The contrast recasts the biblical image as a dispute about travel’s pace and machinery: the desired life is not static, but neither is every kind of movement equally swift. A cartwheel’s slow revolution is a comic counter-image to the narrator’s demand for rapid progress.

Travel as an Argument in Practice

The journey gives the principle its practical setting. Between Calais and Paris, three distinct roads compete for the traveller’s choice, and the deputies of the towns along them can consume half a day arguing their cases. One route by Lisle and Arras is longer but described as more interesting and instructive; the road by Amiens offers the prospect of Chantilly. Travel promises discovery, but even before departure the movement forward is arrested by the need to decide how to move.

The narrator’s account of Calais exposes another limit: a traveller need not have seen a place closely in order to produce a confident description of it. He says that he knows little more of Calais than what his barber told him, having landed at dusk and left in darkness; nevertheless, by drawing one thing from another and piecing details together, he claims he could write a long chapter with the air of the town clerk. The joke sharpens the difference between bodily travel and genuine observation. Physical movement supplies the occasion for travel writing, but does not guarantee knowledge of what lies along the route.

The desire to sleep through the journey meets an equally literal obstacle in the repeated business of paying for horses. At each stage, the traveller must take out three livres and fifteen sous and count them sous by sous. Preparing the precise sum in advance does not solve the problem: there may be two sous missing for a drink, a Louis XIV twelve-sous piece that will not pass, or an unreturned balance from the previous stage. The argument over payment wakes the traveller, and the tiny print in the book of post-roads forces his eyes open to check whether the fare covers a single post or a post and a half. Offers of snuff, requests for water, and other interruptions further restore his rational powers. Here motion remains necessary to the journey, but its repeated tolls obstruct the passive, effortless progress the traveller wants.

Speed, Pleasure, and Their Cost

The collapse of a chaise initially looks like a gift to the traveller’s love of movement. Walking into Lyons beside his baggage, which is being carried slowly before him in a cart, he decides that he is glad the chaise is broken: he can go by water to Avignon for seven livres, cover a hundred and twenty miles, then cross the plains of Languedoc on mules or asses. He calculates that the misfortune will put four hundred livres into his purse and imagines the pleasure of racing down the Rhône, with Vivarais on one side and Dauphiny on the other, past Vienne, Valence, and Viviers. The movement he celebrates is at once economical and sensuous, combining speed, landscapes, and the prospect of a renewed spring in the blood.

That imagined freedom is itself unstable. As the narrator looks at the wrecked chaise, its size seems to shrink, its paint lose freshness, and its gilding lose lustre; what first appeared stately becomes poor and contemptible. A chaise-undertaker offers to refit or buy it. The narrator chooses to sell, valuing its ironwork at forty livres, its glasses at another forty, and its leather as something the buyer may live on. The episode turns a broken vehicle into both a material asset and a prompt for imagining a more mobile route: motion depends not only on desire but on what the traveller can do with damaged equipment.

The narrator’s confidence in speed also undergoes revision. After calling a principle learned on leaving Chantilly the best for travelling quickly, he admits that experience has made him abandon it. Although it gets him onward at a tearing rate, it also makes him uneasy, spoils the digestion of a good supper, and brings on bilious diarrhoea. The illness returns him to his first principle, and he sets off again toward the Garonne. Motion still wins against stopping, but speed is no longer treated as a simple good: the body registers its price and forces a change in how the journey proceeds.

Motion, Perspective, and Narrative Pace

The narrator’s defense of motion is also a defense of his own position in the argument. He says that no person thinks rightly while contained within the body, because congenial humours blur judgment and fibres that are too lax or too tense draw people in different directions. Reason, in his formulation, is partly sense; even the measure of heaven is limited by present appetites and bodily concoctions. Hall and the narrator may disagree about motion, but the narrator presents neither judgment as independent of physical constitution. The body that makes Hall value rest and the thinness that helps the narrator prize movement condition their opposing accounts.

That bodily account does not settle which speaker is right. Instead, it makes the disagreement part of the subject: a general verdict about travel cannot be separated neatly from the traveller’s body and disposition. The contrast between rest as heaven and motion as life remains unresolved as an abstract proposition, while the narrative supplies concrete tests—fatigue, payments, routes, damaged transport, and illness—through which either position can become persuasive.

The journey’s narrative pace enacts the same tension. The narrator refuses to pause and give the people’s character, genius, manners, customs, laws, religion, government, manufactures, commerce, finances, and hidden resources, despite claiming to have spent three days and two nights making them the subject of inquiry and reflection. Instead, paved roads, short stages, and long days demand that he move on; he expects to reach Fontainebleau before the king, then immediately qualifies the comparison by admitting that he does not know whether the king is going there. This comic rush refuses the stationary completeness of the conventional travel account. Motion supplies the narrator’s energy, while digression and abrupt qualification make forward travel inseparable from the unstable, self-interrupting act of telling.