Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Roses Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world. Praise for Wanderlust : “Solnit is an elegant essayist . . . [she] joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, paleontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism.” —The New York Times “A tour de force . . . Solnit's is a sinuous course propelled by abandon yet guided by a firm intelligence . . . she has a fine sense of paradoz that keeps her from prosletyzing . . . a writer of unflagging grace, has a remarkable ability to wrest meaning from the mundane.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[Solnit is] a rigorous polymath capable of stunning flashes of original thought . . . fascinating.” —Los Angeles Weekly “[Solnit's] words remind us of walking's simple joy and return us to a time when an aimless contemplative stroll was a daily activity, not a guilty pleasure.” —The New York Times Book Review “Solnit's thoughtful, thought-provoking, and delightful exploration of the seemingly mndane topic of walking offers an abundance of new ways to think . . . An entertaining and utterly compelling read, filled with facts and observations, written with elegance and eloquence.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian “Idiosyncratic and inspiring . . . Wanderlust is an anecdotal On the Road , a rambling woman's paean to the mind-body connection.” —Voice Literary Supplement “An erudite history of walking studded with arresting insights.” —Elle “Rich with brilliant observaiton and detail . . . full of beautiful aphorisms and leaps of imagination, a scholarship of evocation rather than definition.” — Salon Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark , River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West , Wanderlust: A History of Walking , and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art , which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Wanderlust A History of Walking By Rebecca Solnit Penguin Books Copyright ©2001 Rebecca Solnit All right reserved. ISBN: 0140286012 Chapter One Tracing a Headland: An Introduction Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright betweenthe earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heeltouches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of thefoot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the bodyshifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another stepand then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm ofwalking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walkingthat wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy,allegory, and heartbreak.     The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can befound in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets,and almost everyone's adventures. The bodily history of walking is that of bipedalevolution and human anatomy. Most of the time walking is merely practical, theunconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation,a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologicallylike and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and theoffice worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, insome sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Likeeating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings,from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Here thishistory begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture,of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times bydifferent kinds of walks and walkers. That imagination has both shaped and beenshaped by the spaces it passes through on two f