Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Solnit's "history of walking" is a surprising excursion in a vast and unsystematised subject area. Indeed, like eating and playing, walking is one of these emblematic human activities that are invested with wildly different cultural meanings. I picked up the book because I am an avid walker and mountaineer and, as I learned, an adherent to the British walking tour ethos. For me there is something fundamentally cleansing, wholesome and right about spending time in the great outdoors. However, this smug romanticism, this adhering to an "established religion for the middle class" is sternly criticised by the author of this book. For Solnit walking is a quintessentially political activity. And the politics play out at different levels. First, walking is a bulwark against the erosion of the mind by the incessant contemporary rethoric of efficiency and functionality. The walker exposes herself to the accidental, the unexpected, the random and unscreened, and by doing so rebels against the speed and alienation endemic in our postindustrial world. Second, walking is also a reclamation of a physical and public space that is increasingly suburbanised and privatised. Solnit discusses how the early 20th century city was an arena for aesthetic experimentation and political agitation. Walkers and flaneurs, starting with De Quincey in London and Baudelaire in Paris, experimented with an urban underground culture suffused with eroticism and desire. Protest marchers all over the world and throughout the ages have relied on the democratic functions of the street to make their voices heard. Today, the scope for these kinds of trespasses are increasingly rare due to encroaching private property rights and a soulless, panoptic urban architecture. Hence, thus Solnit, we need to revitalise a counterculture to walk in resistance to the post-industrial and post-modern loss of space, time and embodiment. Last and perhaps not least, walking is and will remain the domain of the amateur. It is one of these few areas of human activity where a hierarchy based on expertise makes very little sense. Everyone, barring physical disabilities, is in principle able to be an expert walker. Beyond the political, there is also a phenomenological dimension to walking which is quite deftly described by Solnit as an "alignment between mind, body and the world". Whoever has spent a couple of days on the trail knows that once the rhythm has been established, one becomes much more alert to minute variations in sensory input (smell, colour, temperatur). Meanwhile, the mind starts to wander much more freely. Solnit writes: "This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it." Solnit's smart and cogent survey of 3 centuries of walking is appropriately brought into relief by her supple and subtle prose which is a real pleasure to read. Her writing is warmly personal -

In "Wanderlust" Rebecca Solnit weaves together myriad facets of the human experience to chronicle the role of walking. As can be expected, this is a complex topic, covering not only the details of geographic locale but the sociological and historical context of the subject as well. In this book, Solnit uses walking as both central theme and backdrop, using the topic as a stepping stone to meander onto her ruminations on diverse topics. Her discursions are thought provoking, enlightening and diverse. It is almost as if the author invites you to join her on a walk, sharing with you her insights on human condition. If not for the place, time and gender to which she is born, Solnit comes across as a "Peripatetic" - a wandering philosopher. At the end of the book, one has the feeling of coming home from an excursion wiser and more thoughtful.

The history of walking is unwritten. Walking allows us to be in our bodies in the world. The motions of the mind cannot be traced, but the feet can. The author walks us through an old Nike missile range. She protests with others at a Nevada test site. With Thoreau, Rebecca Solnit is both a poet of nature and a critic of society. Walking as a conscious cultural act begins with Rousseau. Nietzsche turned to solitary walks for recreation. In Rousseau's ideology walking is the emblem of the simple man. Rousseau portrays walking as both an exercise of simplicity and an opportunity for contemplation. Walking encourages a kind of unstructured associative thinking. A lone walker is both present and detached. Kierkegaard found himself in such a state. He proposed that the mind works best when surrounded by distraction. Husserl claimed that by walking we understand our bodies in relationship to the world. Walking upright preceded the development of the large brain in man. The pilgrimage is one of the basic modes of walking. There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in pilgrimage. The Civil Rights Movement was tempered with the imagery of pilgrimage more than most struggles. The first fund-raising walk, a walkathon for the March of Dimes, began in 1970. On a religious pilgrimage in New Mexico the author encountered a Cadillac with the stations of the cross painted on it. The promenade is a subset of walking. Then there is the customized car and the cruise--low riders. William and Dorothy Wordsworth were vigorous walkers. Wordsworth and his peers seem to be the founders of a tradition. The English landscape garden asked to be explored. The emphasis on the pictorial and the existence of scenic tourism were invented in the eighteenth century. Walks are everywhere in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. The garden walk provided relief form the group. Wordsworth tried to understand the French Revolution by walking the streets of Paris. Walking was Wordsworth's means of composition. Hazlitt's essay on walking became the foundation of a genre. Bruce Chatwin did not distinguish nomadism from walking. John Muir went from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys in 1867. Since English mountaineers found the Alpine Club in 1857, outdoor organizations have been proliferating. The first High Trip under the auspices of the Sierra Club took place in 1901. A taste for the wilderness is culturally determined. Everywhere but in Britain, walking became hiking. In England and elsewhere there was a problem of access to the land. The Highland Clearances,1780-1855, for one example, displaced quantities of people. In 1824 the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was founded near York. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of land ownership but on paths, a sort of circulatory system of the whole. The YMCA was an early sponsor of walking clubs. The history of both urban and rural walking is a history of freedom. Dickens indicated the

When I picked up this book at the local bookstore it was an impulse. But after reading this book i found that it was exactly what I had been looking for. All my life I have been using walking as my way to unwind from school or just to vent some frustration. It seemed to reaffirm what I thought was my true path and showed my some ways to keep the trip long. If you are the person who walks for the sake of walking or to focus your thoughts it's for you. If you are the type who does it to exersise or something else then im not so sure but all around its a good read for everyone.

I found this book to be a fascinating read because of Solnit's writing style and because of her commentary on the subject of walking. Although I have always enjoyed walking myself Solnit helped me understand some of the more philosophical reasons why. Contrary to the views of other reviewers Solnit does include her own commentary such as her experience on the Chimayo pilgrimage and as a woman walking down the streets of her own neighborhood in San Francisco. One may say Why not read the people Solnit quotes rather than Wanderlust, but the fact is Wanderlust increased my exposure to such works and helped me understand their context. Her perspective on the history of the freedom to walk is truly eye-opening; we take it for granted that these days we can pretty much walk anywhere we want to. But, it's really an extended essay.