ABSTRACT
Since this chapter is about walking, it seems reasonable to start out with a footnote. This will be covered, later on, by a bootnote. A footnote should be at the end; this one, right at the start, takes us back, to Plato’s Symposium, to the speech of Aristophanes in that text, and its recounting of an unfinished history of walking-in fact of the prehistory of walking, a sort of pre-walk, rewalked or reworked, which will be my preamble.1 The Symposium is anyway constructed around a walk (the narrator got it from his friend as they strolled into Athens); and this walk partly involves the recounting of another walk (at the beginning, Socrates goes with his companion to a drinking party). Aristophanes’ tale is about the prewalk and pre-women (and pre-men, too) that make their later variants look strange, make the image of normality (upright men and women) seem deviant, a humorous wrong turning, in relation to the beings from which they originated.
