Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

The years of harassment received in youth constitute an education in the limits of one’s life, even long after the daily lessons stop.

Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public, so that the law often actively interferes with their freedom of movement.

similar murders motivated by gender, though they fill the newspapers and take the lives of thousands of women every year, are not contextualized as anything but isolated incidents that don’t require social reform or national soul-searching.

Women have been enthusiastic participants in pilgrimages, walking clubs, parades, processions, and revolutions, in part because in an already defined activity their presence is less likely to be read as sexual invitation, in part because companions have been women’s best guarantee of public safety.

it is impossible to know what would have become of many of the great male minds had they been unable to move at will through the world.

If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of their humanity.

. . every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem. Even if you walk exactly the same route every day—as with a sonnet—the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day. .

Freedom to walk is not of much use without someplace to go.

Thus far this book has surveyed pedestrian life in rural and urban spaces, and the history of walking is a history of cities and countryside, with a few towns and mountains thrown in for good measure. Perhaps 1970, when the U.S. Census showed that the majority of Americans were—for the first time in the history of any nation—suburban, is a good date for this golden age’s tombstone.

Walking still covers the ground between cars and buildings and the short distances within the latter, but walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination.

Perhaps walking is best imagined as an “indicator species,” to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble.

the history of suburbia is the history of fragmentation.

At the same time the modern cult of the home as a consecrated space apart from the world began, with the wife-mother as a priestess who was, incidentally, confined to her temple.

the suburban home housed little more than the nuclear family and was to become more and more a site only of consumption.

Work and home had never been very separate until the factory system came of age and the poor became wage-earning employees.

One could walk in the suburbs, but there was seldom anyplace to go on foot in these homogenous expanses of quiet residential streets behind whose walls dwelt families more or less like each other.

To unlock the rigid geographic segregation, an individual needs to obtain a key—which is a motor vehicle.

Television, telephones, home computers, and the Internet complete the privatization of everyday life that suburbs began and cars enhanced. They make it less necessary to go out into the world and thus accommodate retreat from rather than resistance to the deterioration of public space and social conditions.

In these sprawls, people are no longer expected to walk, and they seldom do.

Suburban sprawls generally make dull places to walk, and a large subdivision can become numbingly repetitious at three miles an hour instead of thirty or sixty.

Geographer Richard Walker defines urbanity as “that elusive combination of density, public life, cosmopolitan mixing, and free expression.”

Political engagement may be one of the things suburbs have zoned out.

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

In a way, the train mangled not just that one man’s body, but all bodies in the places it transformed, by severing human perception, expectation, and action from the organic world in which our bodies exist.

“The speed and mathematical directness with which the railroad proceeds through the terrain destroy the close relationship between the traveller and the travelled space,”

The traveller who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveller and became, as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a parcel.”

Speed did not make travel more interesting, Schivelbusch writes, but duller; like the suburb, it put its inhabitants in a kind of spatial limbo. People began to read on the train, to sleep, to knit, to complain of boredom.

A body regarded as adequate to cross continents, like John Muir’s or William Wordsworth’s or Peace Pilgrim’s, is experienced very differently than a body inadequate to go out for the evening under its own power.

In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.

The decline of walking is about the lack of space in which to walk, but it is also about the lack of time—the disappearance of that musing, unstructured space in which so much thinking, courting, daydreaming, and seeing has transpired.

The suburbs made walking ineffective transportation within their expanses, but the suburbanization of the American mind has made walking increasingly rare even when it is effective. Walking is no longer, so to speak, how many people think.

People have a kind of mental radius of how far they are willing to go on foot that seems to be shrinking;

The body has ceased to be a utilitarian entity for many Americans, but it is still a recreational one, and this means that people have abandoned the everyday spaces—the distance from home to work, stores, friends—but created new recreational sites that are most often reached by car: malls, parks, gyms.

If walking is an indicator species, the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion.

That muscles have become status symbols signifies that most jobs no longer call upon bodily strength: like tans, they are an aesthetic of the obsolete.

It is that the straining of the muscles can require a gym membership, workout gear, special equipment, trainers and instructors, a whole panoply of accompanying expenditures, in this industry of consumption, and the resulting muscles may not be useful or used for any practical purpose.

The treadmill is a corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go.

The treadmill seems to be one of many devices that accommodate a retreat from the world, and I fear that such accommodation disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all.

On the treadmill, walking is no longer contemplating, courting, or exploring. Walking is the alternate movement of the lower limbs.

In many ways, walking culture was a reaction against the speed and alienation of the industrial revolution. It may be countercultures and subcultures that will continue to walk in resistance to the postindustrial, postmodern loss of space, time, and embodiment.

For the artists who took up the invitation Kaprow outlined, art ceased to be a craft-based discipline of making objects and become a kind of unbounded investigation into the relationship between ideas, acts, and the material world.

and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone, and that is another space too,” Long wrote years later.

his brief texts and uninhabited images leave most of the journey up to the viewer’s imagination, and this is one of the things that distinguishes such contemporary art, that it asks the viewer to do a great deal of work, to interpret the ambiguous, imagine the unseen.

He has gone to Australia, the Himalayas, and the Bolivian Andes to make his work, and the idea that all these places can be assimilated into a thoroughly English experience smacks of colonialism or at least high-handed tourism.

the rural walk is a culturally specific practice, and though it may be a civil, gentle thing in itself, imposing its values elsewhere is not.

His work is breathtakingly beautiful at times, and its insistence that the simple gesture of walking can tie the walker to the surface of the earth, can measure the route as the route measures the walker, can draw on a grand scale almost without leaving a trace, can be art, is profound and elegant.

the Chinese tradition of the “‘four dignities’—Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are ‘dignities’ in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes,”

It may be, however, a much smaller but more pervasive invention that most shaped this city in the Mojave Desert: air conditioning,

I realized later that my walk was an attempt to find a continuity of experience here, the spatial continuity walking usually provides, but the place would defeat me with its discontinuities of light and fantasy.

Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking. It has always been an amateur activity, one not requiring special skills or equipment, one eating up free time and feeding visual curiosity. To satisfy curiosity you must be willing to seem naive, to engage, to explore, to stare and be stared at, and people nowadays seem more willing or able to enter that state elsewhere than at home.