I love to walk but I don’t walk to relax. Wherever I walk – along city streets or in the countryside – I find my mind races more than usual, bombarded by what I see and by the memories, speculations, and questions that the act of putting one foot in front of the other seems to stimulate.  Physical wandering provokes mental wandering. “While walking, the brain rages” as Werner Herzog puts it.

In the hard winter of 1974, Herzog walked from Munich to Paris to see his mentor Lotte Eisner, believing that Eisner, dangerously ill at the time, wouldn’t or couldn’t die if he set out to see her on foot. Strange? Yes, of course, but if you know Herzog’s films you’ll know he’s no stranger to strangeness. Even the title is puzzling. Who walks in ice (instead of on it)?

It’s not easy to classify this short book. Journal, travelog, fairy tale, and meditation all wrapped together in one remarkable, engrossing package. It’s presented in the form of a diary but it’s a diary in which observations are entwined with fantasies and imaginings. It is, above all, an exercise in magical thinking and perhaps a very successful one. Lotte Eisner lived for nine years after Herzog’s pilgrimage.