Wanderlust. Una historia del caminar

by Rebecca Solnit

Un fascinante retrato de la infinita gama de posibilidades que se presentan a pie. Analizando temas que van desde la evolución anatómica hasta el diseño de las ciudades, pasando por las cintas de correr, los clubes de senderismo y las costumbres sexuales, Solnit sostiene que las diferentes variantes del desplazamiento pedestre —incluido caminar por placer— suponen una acción política, estética y de gran significado social. Para ello se centra en los caminantes más significativos de la historia y de la narrativa, cuyos actos extremos y cotidianos han dado forma a nuestra cultura: filósofos, poetas, montañeros... De Wordsworth a Gary Snyder, de Jane Austen a Elizabeth Bennet y Andre Breton, existe una larga asociación histórica entre caminar y filosofar.

La evidencia fósil de la evolución humana señala que la capacidad de moverse en posición vertical, sobre dos patas, es la que distinguió a los humanos de las otras bestias y la que nos permitió dominarlas. Para la autora, hay una clara relación entre el caminar y el pensamiento. Caminar —dice Solnit— es el estado en el que la mente, el cuerpo y el mundo están alineados. Wanderlust reproduce, en la sencillez y cadencias de su prosa, los ritmos de un buen paseo.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel, Essays, Walking, Philosophy, Nature

472 pages, Paperback with flaps

First published August 27, 2014

About the author

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.

Reviews

[Rachelfm · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book much more than I did, and kept waiting for it to get good. I want to also acknowledge at the outset that it languished on my Kindle for about 8 months as I got through it 1% of the time at a very plodding pace. Whenever I'd be stuck someplace with nothing else to read and go, "Ugh, fine, I'll work on the dang walking book again." I'm not sure I'd have been so committed if it hadn't been one of my Your Next 5 Books at the Seattle Public Library. I originally got it because one of my subgoals last year was to read 60 books written by women. Also, as one who has been car-free or car-lite my whole life, I've got some pedestrian street cred and often want to literarily bump fists with my peeps, as it were.

I guess my issues with under-enthusiasm are these:
1) The history of walking seems to start with romanticism. I have uneven feelings about that time, and so it's hard to really jam on that point.
2) There are times when an author's personal experiences and observations on a subject, her own personal encounter with the matter at hand, truly enhance the narrative. In fairness, most of the author's experiences walking describe Paris, San Francisco and the deserts in the American West. I'm not sure that there are three places that I would connect with less on an imaginative level, but I'm sort of a crank. At any rate, I found it a bit distracting to dip into her life after I'd been chewing my cud on the Lake District, so to speak.
a) Writing about walking in Paris almost inevitably results in the injudicious overuse of the word flâneur.
b) Some of the writing about the desert walking was pretty interesting, especially the AFL-CIO strike in Las Vegas and the walk to Los Angeles. However, (cranky) I'm always hyperaware of anything American desert-y that strays into "the crystals led me to a spirit quest with the Hopi" because OMG, the people you run into in hostels in Santa Fe.
3) One of the author's main points is that walking can be a political and feminist act. There was a lot of discussion of reclaiming public space at the pedestrian scale and to move beyond the idea of women who walk are streetwalkers. That's rad. But this book had SUCH as western perspective. I can't help but think that for the majority of the world's women, walking is NOT an empowering act, because the loads of water and firewood that need to be trekked back home have to be done under the power of women at the exclusion of their own economic and intellectual development. The only really non-western examples that come to mind are some eastern European artists who were walking the Great Wall of China.
a)Ugh, also, Philistine alert, but I'm rarely moved by post-modern minimalist performance art. Probably because I'm one of the sheep. But reading about post-modern minimalist performance art about walking was a bit excruciating for my Cro-Magnon brain.
b)Isn't this where you'd get some serious mileage (pun intended) waxing poetically about the Montgomery bus boycotts?
4) Some biology about how walking affects us and the differences in bodies of walkers vs. non-walkers would have been interesting. I remember reading a kinesiology study about how the gaits and strides of African women are different, ostensibly because of carrying heavy loads on their heads.
5) It's also possible that when this book was published nearly 15 years ago that ideas about sidewalks and cul-de-sacs and not driving half a mile to do something and public spaces were a bit more fringe-y than they are today.

I'm sure I'll give Rebecca Solnit another chance; it's possible that this subject has so many ways to be handled that the path she chose didn't appeal to me. Also, she coined the term "mansplaining," so I'm interested in her cultural commentary.

[Cecily]

I bought this on a whim, after being stunned by the ethereal beauty and insight of A Field Guide to Getting Lost this summer, which I reviewed HERE.

This is good, but more ordinarily so. If you want a literate non-fiction book about the history and philosophy of walking, this may be for you. It turns out that I don’t. But it’s not her; it’s me.
Hence, this “review” is just notes on pages 1 to 103 of 291.

Thinking Points

Walking the way we do is uniquely human. Other bipedal creatures have wings or tails, or they hop or jump. It frees our hands, but the resulting changes to the human pelvis limit the size of a babies’ heads, so could ultimately cap our intelligence!

Image: Evolution of human skeleton to bipedalism (Source.)

“Walking begins as delayed falling and the fall meets with the Fall.”
That reminded me of a favourite line from Life, the Universe and Everything that the knack of flying is “to throw yourself at the ground and miss”.

Walking “as a conscious cultural act” is a remarkably modern phenomenon. First, there were the formal gardens of the eighteenth century, where those who didn’t need to work could exercise (gently) on land not needed for cultivating food.


Image: Lady in a Garden by Edmund Leighton (Source.)

In Jane Austen’s novels:
“Walking provided shared seclusion for crucial conversations”
I sometimes find that true myself - though it can be just as true of a car journey or a private meal.

Later, William and Dorothy Wordsworth wrote eloquently about their walks/hikes in the Lake District. They inspired other poets, painters, the start of scenic tourism, and the rise of the word “picturesque”.


Image: Inspirational daffodils at Glenconyne Bay, Ullswater (Source.)

Any sort of walking grounds us in the world more than sitting or using external transport, it becomes a means and an end.
“Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.”

Transport technology minimises unstructured travel time, but disconnects us from each other, and the world.
“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other.”

Pilgrimage is a very specific walk where the end to some extent is the means. But the inherent metaphor of travel, travail, journey through life, is one we all relate to, and common to many religions, especially Buddhism.

Memory palaces are a well-worn technique for remembering things by imagining a walk. Most of us rely more on books (or the internet) as repositories of information, but the patterns are similar.

Walking can be a liminal state, between one’s past and future identities.

“A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.”
But there isn’t always one answer: a maze has many routes, but a labyrinth just one.
“The maze offers the confusions of free will without a clear destination, the labyrinth an inflexible route to salvation.”

Features

* A new intro where Solnit brings her nearly 20-year old book more up-to-date, with mention mass protest marches, the obesity epidemic, climate change, and public transport.
* It’s dense and detailed, but helpfully chunked into four sections, each of which comprises three to five titled subsections.
* Comprehensive index.
* References and sources of everyone/thing cited - 26 small-print pages of them.
* A single line of quote-after-quote along the bottom of all the pages. You don’t know the source until you reach the end of each one, maybe several pages later.

[Doreen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected a lot more from this book and turns out I was terribly disappointed at how superficial and reductive her views of walking are. I don't understand the title: where's the history? It's more of a crib note guide and encomium to the theme of walking as found in Great Books of the Western canon. As soon as I found myself interested in a topic she covered, whether it was the perils of women walking or the role of walking and thinking/writing/philosophizing, I was whisked away like a harried mother navigating her child through a crowded supermarket. yes, she seems v. well read but where's the substance, the argument, the understanding of why we should care about concepts/theories/aesthetics/problematics of walking as seen through the eyes of Western writers (predominantly race and class privileged men of letters)? She only touches on how not everyone gets to be a wanderer or even the notion that walking can be used to oppress, torture, and shame. The author's own perambulations also lack depth, development of character, and understanding of place, they are tableau oriented rather than visceral, exploratory, dirty, gritty, shocking, wondrous, or real. They seem all to be placed in retrospect as a method of writing herself into the Western canon. Descriptions are glossy brochures: they tease only to reveal a shallowness of actual experience of place. Well-read she is but Solnit seems to rely on other writers' ideas to coast her through all the varied topics she takes on. The vignettes of her own walking seem completely separate and whimsical and don't ground the reader as they should in the experience of walking; instead,the prose style obfuscates and dis-orients because it is trying too hard to be lyrical and meaningful.

I also dislike the pejorative attitude she has toward the suburbs, communication technologies, car culture, and treadmills. Does she realize what a classist she is? It is an easy target to scoff at people who walk in malls as exercise or go to the gym and use treadmills but it might be better to turn the lens back on one's own freedom to experience walking in Paris as a runaway or camping out in the desert to protest nukes and examine one's own entitlement. Not everyone can live in urban environments nor do they want to. Many new immigrants and working class Americans move to the suburbs to provide better education and opportunities for their chilren--yes it may appear as if the suburbs lack 'culture' in a Matthew Arnold kind of way but surprisingly there are also opportunities for walking and exploring as my own childhood in northern New Jersey attests to. If you read this book, beware of the broad stroke assumptions that underlie much of the discussion. Preferred walking spaces being urban/rural is one of them. that we should take what we know as a walking tradition primarily from canonical writers is another.

[Michael Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know I gave this five stars, but I do have to get my one problem with this book out of the way. Wanderlust, in all that it manages to cover, does not even mention Japanese haibun, a literary form that merges short prose and haiku. This is important because many of these writings came out of long walking tours and travel accounts. Not mentioning Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior seems a crime to me.

That omission out of the way, I can still say that this is a terrific book, covering a lot of ground, surprising even to me as a walker. From the English walking gardens to Las Vegas' disappearing public space, Solnit manages to weave history, literature, politics and more on the subject of walking.

Solnit shows that walking was more than a mode of transportation "back then," but part of the method of meditation and rumination for many philosophers, writers, and artists; a form of protest; and the way one most intensely experiences the world. She also looks at the politics of walking and argues persuasively that walking has been denigrated over the years and much rests on the fight, not only for public space, but for the time to pursue this simple, but important act.

But Wanderlust is not a manifesto. It is filled with fascinating stories about the people and places where this history continues to be written. And even for me, one who has found great value, in the simple walk, has inspired me to make it not just part of the exercise routine, but an integral part of lifestyle.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can imagine that some people are disappointed in this book, because it offers no conventional overview of the history of walking. It's more a collection of musings and digressions about all kinds of cultural-historical aspects of our civilization that are directly or indirectly linked with hiking: protest marches as secular successor of pilgrimages, the care for the environment, the harmful effect of suburbanisation, the relationship between female emancipation and hiking, the relationship between democratization and hiking, and so on.

In between you'll indeed find elements that make possible a reconstruction of the history of walking, but you need to put the puzzle together yourself. I'm sure that Solnit has done this on purpose: her favorite hiking trail is the labyrinth, which she describes as an artificial wilderness and where the final objective also is much less important than the activity of looking and searching itself.

I enjoyed this book, because it is so broad and philosophical, with plenty of interesting critical comments on our culture (from a clearly progressive stance). But at the same time, I also regularly was annoyed with the very specific Californian accents and the sometimes very quirky opinions (for example, about the hypocritical attitude of postmodernist artists). On my Kindle I have marked tenths of valuable quotations, of which I offer one of the most interesting: “Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.”. Not everything by Solnit is solid, but she has become one of my favorite contemporary authors.

[Ken]

In the last two lines of this book, Solnit writes, "Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions, the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imaginations of those who have gone before. The constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

It kind of reminded me of our schooling days when our teachers told us to write "concluding sentences" to our essays. Nutshell, meet thy meat, in other words, and if you want a broad hint of what this book's about, you can't do better than this finish. In it, you will indeed meet an interesting mix of all the characters Solnit lists (though she fails to include herself in cameo spots).

With these peoples and the places walking leads them (for a wide variety of reasons -- vocational, sexual, practical, inspirational, recreational, political, etc.), Solnit builds a solid history of mankind's relationship with its unique upstanding legs. Some countries and cities and cultures are better built for (and more accepting of) walking, you'll find, and men have an easier time of it than women -- especially in cities (one only read about recent goings-on in New York as yet another example), but overall, there are commonalities despite the differences.

Overall, not as compelling as other Solnits (my favorite being her book on Orwell), but still, yeoman work. I hit patches I much enjoyed and dry stretches. Kind of like scenery on a walk, which I do most every day, only sometimes I have to drive to get to new places to explore (unlike denizens of cities).

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my second time reading this book, and I feel as ambivalent about it as I did the first time through. There is just so much in here that it feels a bit overwhelming. Here are two of the notes I made while reading:

June 9 ~~ First chapter was about philosophers and walking. A bit dull. Second was about how and why humans began to walk in the first place, and the debate was still raging at the time she wrote. That was more interesting. Now I am on a chapter about pilgrimages, which is another type of walking altogether. And she complains that at a slow pace or just standing still her feet hurt. I hear you, girl! The hardest thing to do is walk at someone else's slower pace.

June 12 ~~ Chapters on walking and philosophy. Chapters on how we began to walk in the first place and what it meant. Chapters on pilgrimages. Chapters on Wordsworth and the beginning of walking as a leisure activity. And yet another chapter about Wordsworth, who seems to have been responsible for many things regarding that movement. But honestly, it is all a bit dry.

I am a walker. Have been since I was a kid and used to zip down to the corner store on Sundays to buy a paper and lug it home. Three mile round trip and wonderful fun. Since then I have walked many more miles for fun, in competitions, to explore, and to keep myself healthy.

And while I can appreciate the author's general idea here, it was very hard to slog through all the information she shared. It was like doing a 6-Day Ultramarathon in an area where the course is a little rockier than is good for you. At first you try to miss the stones but after a time you are tired and end up stomping on them every few strides. It hurts. It's work. And I don't always like to work when I'm walking, or when I'm reading. I have to be in the proper frame of mind to exercise my brain as much as I needed to do for this book. So if I wait until Someday when I am feeling scholarly and intellectual and high-browed, would I like this better?

I did enjoy seeing names of some authors I recognized and others who are on my reading lists. This is a very literary walking book, tracing the history of walking by the writing that has been done about it over the centuries. I cannot imagine the amount of research it took to dig up all of this information and tie it all together. So kudos to Solnit for the work. And thanks are due also because I have been introduced to Dorothy Wordsworth, William's sister who kept journals of all the walking she did. Apparently he swiped many ideas and images from her pages for his poetry, and even though I am not as familiar with his work as I probably should be if I were a true intellectual, I am very interested to read Dorothy's journals and see if I can recognize anything there.

I also appreciated the introduction to New York poet Frank O'Hara, and I have his poems on my lists now too. So I feel I did get some rewards for keeping myself staggering along to the finish line here. Well, almost to the end. my feet and my brain hurt too much to face the rocky fields of those last few chapters.

Maybe Someday I'll give this book one more walk through. Or I might just send it off on a walkabout of its own. We'll see.

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walking is dead. Long live walking.

I came to this book with admitted biases. One of the goals I keep in my bullet journal is to do at least two "long" walks a month. I define this as a walk of 3+ continuous miles, not on a treadmill, but outdoors. And while I know that this won't seem like much to my European friends (more on that later), for an American to walk three miles straight through and not on a treadmill - well, unfortunately, that is an oddity. Unlike Europe, we're just not built for it here, and Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking addresses that fact from multiple angles.

Solnit traces the strange development of "nature" walks over time. The differences in attitude toward natural paths versus groomed walkways, along with differences among class perceptions of landscape and walking itself, not to mention regional preferences, show a more variegated landscape than the modern reader might expect. You might expect a book on walking to be pretty straightforward, one step after another, right?

It's a bit more complicated than that.

The book begins with anecdotal discussions with anthropologists regarding the very earliest walkers which is, by turns, insightful, funny, irreverent, and which tear through some of the most commonly held misconceptions about early hominids (some of which I held). It's an interesting start and necessary, I guess, but I question the need for it. Is it just a vestigial tale? Perhaps, though later chapters examine the in-body experience of walking in various social and political contexts which also say something about bodies and their physical place in the world, as well as what the exercise of the use of those bodies means (I do not only mean in the sense of physical fitness, as this is just a by-product of walking).

There was a bit of metalepsis in my reading of Wanderlust, though it was purely unintentional. When I am working at the office here in town, I always take some time to go for a walk on the Ice Age Trail, which passes very near to my workplace. I also walk home from work sometimes, after my wife has dropped me off on days when she needs the car (yes, we are one of those rare and elusive one-car American families). On my last long walk home from work (4.2 miles), I was heading down the sidewalk reading this book, and a total stranger, who was mowing her lawn, stopped her lawnmower to ask what I was reading (note: I wish there were more people like this in the world!). I showed her the cover and she just started laughing out loud. We exchanged pleasantries and I was on my way again. I'm kind of worried that she's going to intercept me another time, when I'm reading something far more morbid or controversial.

Speaking of which, Solnit does not shy away from controversy. She has an entire chapter on sex workers and the freedom and limits of such work when related to walking. She also presents a chapter on walking as a revolutionary political act, from the Civil Rights protests to the Argentine mothers of the "disappeared" walking in solidarity against a tyrannical regime.

Earlier, I had mentioned Europe. I was born in Europe and lived over half of my childhood there. So maybe I see the auto-mation of American society with a bit more of a critical eye than most of my American friends. Last month, I had the opportunity to go to Germany for a week for work (I work for a German-based company), followed by a week's vacation in Belgium and The Netherlands. On average, I think we walked about 6 or 7 miles a day. When we weren't walking, we took trains almost everywhere. I had a rental car for my first week in Germany, but really only used it to get from Amsterdam to Oelde and back, then out for dinner for one night. Other than those three trips, we stood on trains and walked and walked and walked. For my American friends, what you need to understand about Europe is that it is BUILT for walking. Some of it has to do with scale (Germany and Wisconsin are almost exactly the same size, for comparison), some of it has to do with history (plazas built around medieval marketplaces or Renaissance and Baroque cathedrals), but much of it has to do with choice: the choice to let pedestrians (and bicycles) predominate. The old medieval streets are simply too small to avoid congestion, but rather than just widening the roads (and destroying several historical buildings in the process), Europe has, by and large, pushed cars to the outskirts. Having a healthy public transportations system makes this more feasible (though some would argue that the amount of strikes and delays that occur is anything but "healthy" - thanks, privatization!) but again, this is a choice made largely by the people who live there, who want walkable, bike-able streets, helped along by the scale of the cities and countries in question.

I could go on and on about third places and the lack thereof in the states, but I will try to bite my tongue a bit after stating that the disappearance of third places in the US has everything to do with the prevalence of automobiles. The one really depressing moment I had while on vacation was looking over a plaza thronged with people mostly just hanging out and eating Italian ice cream (those who know, know) and people-watching, while realizing that there really are no places like that, none, zero, zilch any closer to me than Chicago (an hour and a half and a parking nightmare away).

I didn't take this book with me when I travelled, and I'm glad I didn't. I might have just opted to stay there. Walking, as you can probably guess, is a part of me and a very important part of my life.

When I returned from Europe and got back into the groove of work again, I naturally picked up where I left off. The funny thing is that I was simultaneously reading Walter Benjamin's collection of essays, Illuminations. I discovered that Solnit mentions Benjamin explicitly and particularly his thoughts on Baudelaire, something that had struck me while reading Benjamin's book. It seems all (walking) roads lead to Baudelaire in some way. It was all a very strange synchrony, though the figure of the Flâneur might just be the hinge on which all these synchrony's rotate, at least as far as urban walkers go.

But Solnit is equally at home (or away from home?) in presenting the history of rural walking, as well; something I know a little bit about. Here, also, one finds a long tradition of political protest in the form of voting with one's feet (and sometimes, fists). Protest marches in England, for example, seem to have originated in the country over contested right-of-ways through public and private land. I recall, in fact, when I lived in England, at the base I lived on, there was a "bridal path" we were told was required to allow the Queen to ride her horse on, whenever she wished it. But it actually acted as a public path, at times, with anti-nuclear protesters (this wasn't a nuclear base, but the protesters had no idea) from the CND marching through every few months or so. So long as they stayed on that path, there was really nothing to be done about it. If they strayed from it . . . well, I've seen what British police can do. There's a reason British cops don't have to carry guns, and it's not because they are convincing conversationalists.

I'm guessing, though, that Rebecca Solnit is a convincing conversationalist. I can attest to the fact that she is a convincing writer. If nothing else, I'd love to take a long walk and talk with her.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I labored through it. I am a walking addict, and expected a more personal connection with the author. While Ms. Solnit did include numerous examples of personal walks, I was not able to hang with her and see the countryside, inner or outer. This is more a book about philosophers and famous literary and artistic personalities that just happened to be walkers.

[Hendrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich mag Gehen, weil es langsam ist, und ich habe den Verdacht, dass der Geist wie die Füße mit rund fünf Kilometern die Stunde arbeitet. Und wenn dem so ist, dann bewegt sich das moderne Leben mit größerer Geschwindigkeit als das Denken – oder die Nachdenklichkeit.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to my upbringing, to summers in the woods and weekend forest walks all year long with Father and the dog, I've always enjoyed walking, particularly in nature, especially over new terrain, but even through the neighborhoods of cities. Thanks to the ageing of my peers and, with such, their increased responsibilies and increasing incidences of disability, I've had less opportunity to do so in company and, so, less inclination. A dog, a good dog, would help, but I live in an apartment, in a city, the cabin in the woods is gone, and having the kind of dog who'd be a good companion would not be appropriate for these urban environs. Thus I borrow dogs and children, if I can get them, and try to find new friends as interested in adventure as I am.

It's not just the walking, nor is it simply the adventure of new routes and new sights, it's also conversation. One can listen to almost anything on a good walk and not become bored--and if the conversation flags, there are always the sights, the impulsive decisions to alter direction or duck into a new storefront. Besides, a good walk is a matter of hours, even a whole day, and is consequently conducive to sufficient treatments of subjects, something which rarely happens in ordinary, chair-bound, oft-distracted conversation.

This book was given me by a cafe friend, cafes being my home-away-from-home and the primary place where I make new acquaintances--and read for that matter. She's done three (she claims more--see note) walks with me, both purposive, neither long enough, but still most appreciated. Out of pity, perhaps with some sympathy, she gave this book to me as a consolation.

Author Solnit understands all this and much more. Wanderlust ends with an appreciation of walking--and indictments of atomized suburban car-culture--but the bulk of it consists of meditations on themes related to walking. There's a history of a sort of one aspect of environmentalism, a history of sorts of parks, of street demonstrations, of street walkers, of peripatetic philosophers and of mountaineering--none of them exhaustive, none of them quite long enough, but all suggestive.

I hadn't, when I received this book, thought to expect much of it. "Walking? What is there to say about walking?" I wondered. Now I wish Solnit had said more, a bit about arctic trudges perhaps, about the travels and travails of the disabled, about the riparian rights of strollers...

Note: In Woody Allen's Annie Hall there's a representation of the respective visits of himself and his girlfriends to their therapists. He complains about the lack of sex. She complains of the constant sex.

[Pauline]

Premier livre de ma PAL tiré au sort. Je suis bien heureuse de m’être accrochée parce que c’était très intéressant, même si jamais fascinant pour moi qui ne suis pas PASSIONNÉE de marche à pied. Vers la fin les chapitres sur la place des femmes dans la rue et sur Las Vegas m’ont fait penser « je ne regrette pas cette lecture ». Néanmoins malgré l’érudition de l’ouvrage, comme pour certains titres de bell hooks je regrette qu’il nous parvienne en français avec 21 ans de retard. Ça le rend vraiment daté par certains aspects : trop bizarre de lire un livre sur la marche écrit par une penseuse féministe sans que Cheryl Strayed ne soit citée, par exemple.
Globalement une lecture intelligente et facile sur un sujet auquel je ne pensais que peu, un livre qui ne m’a pas renversée mais qui m’a cueillie au bon moment, me permettant de profiter d’une longue promenade dans une ville étrangère avec beaucoup plus de conscience et d’attention. Et n’est-ce pas ce qu’on attend d’un essai, qu’il nous modifie, même rien qu’un peu.

Edit: Ça m’a frappée mais j’ai oublié de le dire avant de lire d’autres reviews, je suis chagrinée également par le point de vue 100% occidentalocentré sur la question. Sûrement l’art de marcher ne peut pas être étudié en mettant de côté la vaste majorité du monde qui ne vit ni en Europe ni en Amérique du Nord.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Discursive, well-read, full of broad and rambling scholarship. Some chapters are literary criticism, some scientific, some urban planning history, some religious. One heartbreaking moment made me realize the book was published in precisely 2000—no later, no earlier. Less personal than A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but that's not this book's purpose.

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 5 out of 5]

Znak da je ovo dobra istorija hodanja jeste što je samo čitanje poput njega – inspirativno kretanje kroz tekst koje ima odličnog vodiča. Rebeka Solnit je u svom vodičkom poduhvatu suverena – izuzetno temeljna i potkovana, vešto prepliće more podataka sa ličnim iskustvom, koje dodatno oživljava ono o čemu piše. A sama tema hodanja je poput čina hodanja – neomeđena. U nekakvoj idealnoj projekciji, hodanje bi bilo stanje u kojem su um, telo i svest u skladnom poretku, stoga bi i istorija hodanja bila istorija mišljenja koje se izražava u konkretnom prostornom zapisu. Odustajanje od hodanja predstavlja zanemarivanje životnog prostora – čovek živi u celokupnoj prostornosti sveta, a ne samo u zatvorenim zidovima. Takođe, hodanje ima i svoju vremensku dimenziju – ono je sporo, a u vremenu u kome brzina života pretiče brzinu misli, sporost je preko potrebna razmišljajna oaza. I za razliku od drugih oblika kretanja, hodanje je neofanzivno – put u neko mesto obuhvata putnika – sam put nas vraća nama samima. I to je igra prepoznavanja – hvatanja klica sećanja i asocijacija koje nas čine onim što jesmo.

„Utabana staza je iskazano mišljenje o tome šta je najbolji put kojm valja preći određeni predeo. (...) Ponovo hodati istim putem znači potvrditi duboki smisao, jer je proći istom stazom i istim prostranstvom način da čovek ostane ono što jeste, da se ponovo bavi istim mislima. To je neka vrsta pozorišta u prostoru, ali duhovnog pozorišta, u kojem se čovek ne izdaje za nekog drugog, već oponaša svece i bogove u nadi da će im tako postati bliži. ” (74)

Načini hodanja, njegovi oblici i kulturne prakse toliko su raznoliki da nikako ne smeju da se uzmu zdravo za gotovo. Od peripatetičara, preko planinarskih društava, do lend-arta, od hodočasnika do političkih paradi, od vrtova do trake za trčanje, Rebeka Solnit pokazuje šta sve hodanje jeste i šta sve može biti. A odgovore na ta pitanja daju šetači od Vordsvorta, Toroa i De Kvinsija, sve do Valtera Benjamina, Marine Abramović i Ričarda Langa. Hodanje je misaoni, umetnički, kulturni, religijski, komunikativni, telesni, politički, (javno-privatni), čak i seksualni čin. Dakle, krajnje neposredno, identitetsko pitanje. Štaviše, Rebeka Solnit tvrdi da se po sposobnosti da uspravno hoda čovek razlikuje od svih ostalih bića – ono je anatomski uslovljeno. Dok se ostale dvonožne vrste kreću skakutanjem ili geganjem, samo ljudi mogu da ostvare hod. Volja vrste oslikana je u razvoju pojedinca; tako i deca uče da hodaju – iz želje da ostvare ono što im nije bilo omogućeno – da dohvate predmet van domašaja, prouče prostor, budu nezavisna. Hodanje nije protezanje, hodanje je i pounutrašnjenje. Sloboda.

[anna marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

a mixed bag, and definitely a disappointment. i think it is higher than three stars rly but i feel weird giving it 4. main issues include
- wish some focus on disabled ppl making space & marching [or not] was present
- the class analysis needed to be deeper!! the whole way, she talks so vaguely about some issues when the problem is capitalism clearly
- in the chapter on gender solnit writes "other categories of people have had their freedom of movement limited, but limitations based on race, class, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are local and variable compared to those placed on women..." which is a. inaccurate in her own book [bc the sanctions placed on working class women for example are literally discussed] and b. one hell of a claim to make lol.... solnit's [in]attention to race is especially obvious in the chapter about gender and her not total but sort of patronising half-dismissal of the fears and treatment of women of colour as well as black people in general and also lgbt ppl. she makes a load of assumptions that are just untrue!!
i come away wishing i could read this book again but this time if it had been made with a more rigorous anticapitalist, anticolonial, intersectional approach. bc it's really beautifully written and definitely great in some parts!! and walking is a medium/+ activity that has such ~potential for revolutionary politics, earth loving and joy
oh but it was cool that she quoted sarah schulman's sexy dykey novel girls, visions and everything!!!

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't believe much in New Years' Resolutions as I prefer to do my self-improvement periodically throughout the year and not limit myself to a specific time in which to accomplish a goal. However, we are about 25 days away from moving into a new neighborhood, a safer neighborhood, and I am looking forward to being more active again - my boyfriend bought me a bike for Christmas 2007 and I have yet to be able to take it out, we'll be a few blocks away from a dog park, we can walk to the tennis courts and not have to drive, and I'll be walking distance from everything I need which is ideal as I am a non-driver.

Rebecca Solnit's history of walking drew me in. She took a cultural, historical, philosophical, literary, social, political, feminist, green and eco-friendly approach to the dying art and experience of walking. When put in contexts such as those I found it to be very interesting and I am even more eager to move and begin walking.

At times her lengthy essay seemed to be a bit of a stretch in order to flesh out her thesis, though the individual chapters were fascinating in and of themselves. Unfortunately as a whole in the light of walking I felt myself zoning out mentally from time to time. Still I mostly forgive her thanks to her references to Dante, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman and the Prague Spring revolution of 1968. If she would have thrown in Bon Jovi, my heart would have been hers wholly.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than a history of walking, this is an excuse for Solnit to write about things she's interested in: literature she enjoys, turn of the century prostitutes, urban planning, landscape painting, National Parks, shrubberies. The book itself is an unplanned walk, following trails that often veer off in unexpected directions or circle back to themselves, and thus feels less like a history than a collection of essays inspired by the act of walking.

There are gems to be taken to heart, such as...

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

and...

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors — home, car, gym, office, shops — disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

It makes me want to really enjoy walking. Sometimes I do. I recently moved closer to work and I walk on the pleasant days and when I do that, I get what Solnit is saying, about occupying the world rather than just several disconnected interior pods. Even more so when you take a walk in the woods. When you run out of gas on a highway in the flat part of Colorado, it's frightening how much you feel that you are occupying the world. But in the three-quarters of each Louisville year that are inhabited by terribly high or low temperatures (and being the large, sweaty man that I am), I'm reminded that walking really sucks.

And I know this is the opposite of what I should come away from this book saying, but walking suuuucks.

[kimberly_rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Attracted to this title because I'm a committed, contented walker, one who is anti-suburbia and never drives, I ordered it from my library straightaway. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I was bored more times than engaged by this author's narration style and views, and often her selected topics were so specific to her locales as to appeal only to locals or those interested in visiting.

Topics are vast and, depending on the personal interests of each individual reader, range from fascinating to skip-skip-flip-flip, move along, lady. (For myself, I enjoyed the theories behind humans gaining a two-legged, upright POV; the evolution of different social views about walking (noun and verb) in England--that was insightful and supported many historical novels I've read. It was also refreshing to hear the voice of someone who understood my frustration with the modern world cutting off pedestrians, sometimes making it impossible to live in a community without a car.)

The narrator's voice rings a tad annoying (pretentious? dogmatically western?) on occasion. Generally, this is a "it comes and goes" sort of book, one to pick up and read a paragraph or five whenever you feel like a passably stimulating non-fiction thought about walking to ponder.

2.5 stars.

Rachelfm has a detailed review, one I found myself nodding enthusiastically along with as I read.

[Jeff Russo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best part of this book is the early section, which covers the topic of walking in philosophy and literature. Things degrade and wander a bit as things go on, and Solnit's politics start to become obtrusive - she got into thinking about walking as a part of "nuclear freeze" activities, and late in the book is an entire section of abuse directed at suburbs; besides the fact that yes, suburbs are more difficult to walk, it's not really fully at place in this book.

Tyler Cowen noted while reading another of Solnit's books that "the ratio of information to page was too low" and that probably applies here too.

Still, some decent stuff in here and it certainly seems to be an exhaustive interdisciplinary treatment of the subject.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there's one thing I enjoy as much as reading, it's walking, so a book about the history of walking is right up my street. Although, this is not so much a history (at least in chronological terms), more a gently meandering wander through both the highways and bye ways of the subject. And you are travelling with a very erudite enthusiast. So, we go by way of walking philosophers (Rousseau and Kierkegard), obviously Wordsworth and the romantics, a con side ration of the various theories of how, when and why Homo sapiens began to walk upright, walking in Jane Austen novels, a history of formal garden design, walking in cities like San Francisco, New York, London and Paris and so much more. Just like a really good walk, at almost every turn of the page, there's something new and interesting to experience.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Walking, ideally, is a state of mind in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes finally making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without our being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being lost in our thoughts."

"Wanderlust's real pleasures resemble the pleasure of walking. It doesn't systematically press on toward a goal, but savors detail and varied perspectives, stopping to consider the nature of mountaineering, the life of the London streetwalker, the conflict between public right of way and private property in nineteenth-century England and twentieth-century Las Vegas."
.....The New York Times

[Maghily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enfin fini ! :)

Cet ouvrage est dense, part dans tous les sens (comme nos pensées pendant qu'on marche, non ?) mais passionnant.
J'ai parfois décroché mais certains chapitres sont brillants, j'y ai retrouvé la plume qui m'avait séduite chez Rebecca Solnit (Celui sur la figure du flâneur ou de la place des femmes dans la rue <3).

Une lecture au long cours, comme une randonnée de plusieurs jours, que je ne peux que vous recommander ! :)

[Shira]

Edit 11-01'18: make that 3 * for sure! After reading another book, partly about walking, that used Solnits book as a source & inspiration, I couldn't help not to think about this book and value all that research that was done.

Unfortunately I'm quite happy to be finished with this book. I won't get into much detail of all that Rebecca Solnit discusses here. Parts were interesting and fascinating, sure. Especially how walking can be, and is used as political and social criticism (and how the act of walking (I can't even give a good definition of what is implied by 'walking' here) is threatened by many factors).

While reading Wanderlust I quickly realised that maybe I wasn't all too eager to read about the history of walking to start with. That doesn't help to get through a very information dense book! I wanted to abandon it many times but purely to proof to myself I could finish this (and because I thought it was a waste to stop halfway... why?), I finished. And honestly, I'm not unhappy about that, afterwards. For I've came across new facts, writers, and ideas - and for that, it was worth a read.

I blame my not particularly enjoying the read also for how I read (historical) non-fiction. Word for word, slow, wanting to understand every single phrase (without willing to look up every unknown word - maybe I should). It makes me focus too much on things that might've been clear to me had I read quicker, trying to just grab the main points.

Hopefully I'll find myself more comfortably reading books like this in the future. For Wanderlust passed by more as a chore than as a source of new information. Mostly. Some things stuck. If not, I don't know what I would've done with myself (probably go on just the same).

2* (plus a little) - but please go ahead and read it! (If you're interested in the (mostly social and western) history of walking.)

Something I thought beautiful and want to remember:

"[...] In 1985 and 1986, the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum used the street as a performance space, stenciling footprints containing the word unemployed down streets in Scheffield, as if to make visible the sad secrets of passersby in that economically devastated city [...]" p.273

[Don Gagnon · Rating 5 out of 5]

From English gardens to the wilderness, from French arcades to American shopping malls. . . .

Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust A History of Walking” is an entertaining read, an erudite guide for pilgrims, promenaders, and wanderers, for all those who walk for travel and leisure, health and pleasure. In a series of well written essays, the author explored the contemplative, practical, and literary experiences of many who have contributed to the rich history of a universal pastime. Whether one has enjoyed hiking, meandering, parading, promenading, rambling, roaming, skulking, strolling, traversing a landscape or trekking across the countryside, wandering the streets, paths, and walkways of a small town or a big city, wandering to and fro, here and there, farther and farther, through gardens, in a forest, in the mountains, or over the heath, this book will deepen and expand the readers enjoyment of walking.

[Hannah Connors · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't finish this one before I had to return it to the library. I love to walk, and to read, just not so sure about reading about walking.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading Wanderlust the night before I set out to summit a peak in the Dolomites by myself. The weather was dire, and I hiked three hours in the rain, only for the iconic ridgeline-view at the top to be swallowed up by the thickest mist I’ve ever seen. I had expected it, but was determined to go through with it regardless—as an exercise in learning how to walk for the sake of itself, and not for the reward of a destination, a summit, a view. Walking to feel grounded in the landscape, to see how far these feet of mine can carry me, to free up the mind to think.

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

Solnit’s ephemeral A Field Guide to Getting Lost was my favorite book I read last year, and I still think about it often. I was hoping that Wanderlust would capture the same unhurried magic, but this earlier non-fiction work is very different: The musings are just as passionate, but much less autobiographical and introspective, and while there are occasional glimpses of her dazzling prose, this was full of quotes by others, and felt much denser and drier due to its broad and rambling scholarly nature. The title tells you precisely what you get: A digressive history of (Western) walking; a meandering exploration of the act as a cultural, social, political, and leisure activity. It is also, now much more so than at the time of publication, a sort of requiem for walking—a practice increasingly excised by an accelerated, car-dependent world.

“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.”

From English gardens to Alpine peaks, from moorlands to suburban cul-de-sacs, from Paris to Las Vegas, from labyrinths to treadmills, Solnit is our guide on a path that traces the evolution of walking from the development of bipedalism to the modern age, via the walks of romantic poets, tourists, pilgrims, fictional characters, philosophers, courting couples, trespassers, flâneurs, jaywalkers, protesters, mountaineers, revolutionaries, and prostitutes. Link your arm with hers and come along for the stroll, but be prepared to cover a lot of ground in a long-winded yet superficial way. As an avid walker-hiker, I had hoped to connect with and like Wanderlust much more than I did, but it was a bit of a slog, and it took me a month to labor through; the occasional compelling thought couldn’t make up for too many dull stretches.

“Walking… is how the body measures itself against the earth.”

[Aravindakshan Narasimhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Never thought walking had such a history. We may be familiar with gandhi, martin Luther king's marches. Various protest for various reasons, but the cultural phenomenon of walking from its supposedly Greek origins in peripatetic schools through aristocratic garden walks, to countryside walks by Rousseau, Wordsworth , Thoreau, to latest walkathon it has changed its form and metamorphosed completely. Pilgrimages of christians in new mexico ( santa fe) , paseo and corso ( Spanish speaking parts of America and italian respectively ) , flaneurs of Parisian world, mountaineering in sierra niveda to protect the nature from government's so called development agenda, surrealist literature on walking paris to map the body of city through as the female personification, shugendo sect of Buddhism ( banned in 19th century ) - which propounds a philosophy of walking round the mountain as a process to go through six realms of existence, fight for free space in privatised lands by landowners in Uk of 19th century, female vs male history of walking, how suburban planning embodies in it an aversion for a free space to walk( this was one of the best chapters as in it opened my mind to my own surrounding, never saw suburban in this light which is true too)..

This is a just a few drops from the book.
Starting from paleontology, biology , philosophy , history, literature, politics and many other diverse fields this book investigates the declining phenomenon which has defined the humanity for its entire breath.

P.S: As myself a bit of romantic and flaneur type, While this whole week I got up early and strolled my dull and bustling locality early morning and discovered idyllic sites which evoked the peace of nature in me ( the crimson red sunrise falling on the river as I first discovered the place) as well the dull suburban spaces ( very near to the above, the above is anomally perhaps) which intimidates walkers even as early as 6 am.
Also paced back and forth in the home( like Wittgenstein and Wordsworth and child Kierkegaard) daily while reading the book , to the extent that only 2 hours at the maximum were spent in sitting. So that I could orient myself to the rhythm of the topic of the book.

While walking for hours together
You body rejoices the momentary standing
While the body is standing without end
You yearn and bask when the moment allows you to sit
When you sit for hours together
You may want to lie back and rest
And then ?

I will leave you with a quote:


A few years earlier another insurrection found a square for its stage. The saga of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began when these women started to notice each other at the police stations and government offices, making the same fruitless inquiries after children who had been “disappeared” by agents of the brutal military junta that seized power in 1976. “Secrecy,” writes Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, “was a hallmark of the junta’s Dirty War. . . . In Argentina the abductions were carried out beneath a veneer of normalcy so that there would be no outcry, so that the terrible reality would remain submerged and elusive even to the families of the abducted.” Mostly homemakers with little education and no political experience, these women came to realize that they had to make the secret public, and they pursued their cause with a stunning lack of regard for their own safety. On April 30, 1977, fourteen mothers went to the Plaza de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires. It was the place where Argentinean independence had been proclaimed in 1810 and where Juan Perón had given his populist speeches, a plaza at the heart of the country. Sitting there was, a policeman shouted, tantamount to holding an illegal meeting, and so they began walking around the obelisk in the center of the plaza.
There and then, wrote a Frenchman, the generals lost their first battle and the Mothers found their identity. It was the plaza that gave them their name, and their walks there every Friday that made them famous. “Much later,” writes Bouvard, “they described their walks as marches, not as walking, because they felt that they were marching toward a goal and not just circling aimlessly. As the Fridays succeeded one another and the numbers of Mothers marching around the plaza increased, the police began to take notice. Vanloads of policemen would arrive, take names, and force the Mothers to leave.” Attacked with dogs and clubs, arrested and interrogated, they kept returning to perform this simple act of remembrance for so many years that it became ritual and history and made the name of the plaza known around the world. They marched carrying photographs of those children mounted like political placards on sticks or hung around their neck, and wearing white kerchiefs embroidered with the names of their disappeared children and the dates of their disappearances (later they were embroidered instead, “Bring Them Back Alive”).
“They tell me that, while they are marching they feel very close to their children,” wrote the poet Marjorie Agosin, who walked with them. “And the truth is, in the plaza where forgetting is not allowed, memory recovers its meaning.” For years these women taking the national trauma on a walk were the most public opposition to the regime. By 1980 they had created a network of mothers around the country, and in 1981 they began the first of their annual twenty-four-hour marches to celebrate Human Rights Day (they also joined religious processions around the country). “By this time the Mothers were no longer alone during their marches; the Plaza was swarming with journalists from abroad who had come to cover the strange phenomenon of middle-aged woman marching in defiance of a state of siege.” When the military junta fell in 1983, the Mothers were honored guests at the inauguration of the newly elected president, but they kept up their weekly walks counterclockwise around the obelisk in the Plaza de Mayo, and the thousands who had been afraid before joined them. They still walk counterclockwise around the tall obelisk every Thursday.

Post P.S ( first time came across the word in this book): I wish I had a written a detailed review. This book deserves one.

[Iara Couto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nos últimos meses eu só falei sobre esse livro e, apesar de ter alguns altos e baixos, acho que está entre os favoritos da vida.
A história do caminhar mudou a minha perspectiva sobre várias coisas, me fez pensar demais e até deu vontade de fazer uma pesquisa parecida. Obrigada por tudo, Rebecca Solnit.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. If I was told 20 years ago that 20 years later I would be reading a book about the history of walking and giving it 5 stars I would have told my future self to get a life! The book is a study of walking from the past to the present. It looked at walking in a number of different angles (walking as a form of demonstration, walking for pleasure, fitness, walking as art etc) but ultimately it made me get of my butt and do some walking myself much to my wife’s annoyance who has been telling me to do the same things for years! This is what I love about books like these; they make you act / react and in that they change you. The book was really well written and very easy to read. Rebecca is a clearly gifted writer. The book covered other interesting topic areas such as the link between thinking and walking, the use of walking by poets and great writers, labyrinths, gardens, mountain walking, walking clubs, and walking in cities not designed for walking, night walkers, walking in gay Paris and treadmills. Some of my best bits from the book:
• GM Trevelyan said that “I have 2 doctors, my left leg and my right.”
• A lot of large American cities are becoming more and more focussed around commercial activities and where cities would have plazas at the centre which encouraged walking and were designed in the past with the pedestrians in mind, the rise of the automobiles has led to the eradication of these walking zones. Where people could walk from one place to another and meet and interact as we have been designed to do, we have now been replaced with automobiles who only beep at each other and occasionally flash a light in anger.
• The Mothers of Plaza Mayo in Argentina was an exquisite example of the power of walking and the effects that had on the country and even globally now. When a brutal military junta had seized power in Argentina in 1976 a lot of children started to go missing. On April 30 1977 a group of 14 mothers gathered in the plaza de mayo in the centre of Buenos Aires and began walking around an obelisk in the centre. They would get intimidated and even arrested by the junta police but they didn’t give up and slowly over time their anti-clockwise walking in the Plaza attracted more and more mothers. They came there every Friday and now their walk is known around the world and they still walk around there even though the junta fell many years ago.
• Women in Greek times were not apparently allowed to walk as much as the men were. It says that women were thought to lack self-control and could not maintain secure boundaries for themselves which was therefore controlled by the physical walls in which they were contained. Roman women on the other hand were given a lot more freedom and tended to have a much greater role in society. It said that women in Greek times, were not able to maintain these internal boundaries because of their fluid sexuality which endlessly overflowed and disrupted not only themselves but men also. This sounded partly Islamic in the thinking and I couldn’t help thinking that the walls of the house in Greece would have been the equivalent of the Burkini today.
• On 15 September 1830, the first steam engine took off between Manchester and Liverpool. I find it hard to believe but on this pivotal day a member of parliament was killed and run down on the opening ceremony!
• The most mind blowing story of the whole book was about the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay. They both started at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and had initially decided to meet at the centre of the 4000 km distance and get married but their relationship had deteriorated so they decided to meet at the centre and then go their separate ways. The walk took place in 1988. They didn’t meet again till march 31st 2010, 22 years later, when this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg...

Stunning book; massively recommened.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 - with a tone that modulates unexpectedly between stridency and vulnerability - as well as erudite. There is none of the pedantic selfconsciousness that spoils the discourse of many academic writers and popularisers alike. After "Wanderlust" I went on to read Solnit's "Field guide to getting lost" which, although not in the same league, confirms her qualities as an engaging personal voice.