Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

One of the great pleasures of writing about this subject was that, instead of a few great experts, walking has a multitude of amateure—everyone walks, a surprising number of people think about walking, and its history is spread across many scholars’ fields—so that nearly everyone I know contributed an anecdote, a reference, or a perspective to my researches. The history of walking is everyone’s history, but my version of it particularly benefited from the following friends,

The new millenium arrived as a dialectic between secrecy and openness; between consolidation and dispersal of power; between privatization and public ownership, power, and life, and walking has as ever been on the side of the latter.

Walking itself has not changed the world, but walking together has been a rite, tool and reinforcement of the civil society that can stand up to violence, to fear, and to repression. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a viable civil society without the free association and the knowledge of the terrain that comes with walking. A sequestered or passive population is not quite a citizenry.

But more insidious forces are marshalled against the time, space and will to walk and against the version of humanity that act embodies. One force is the filling-up of what I think of as “the time inbetween,” the time of walking to or from a place, of meandering, of running errands. That time has been deplored as a waste, reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations. The very ability to appreciate this uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating, as does appreciation of being outside—including outside the familiar; mobile-phone conversations seem to serve as a buffer against solitude, silence and encounters with the unknown.

The fight against this collapse of imagination and engagement may be as important as the battles for political freedom, because only by recuperating a sense of inherent power can we begin to resist both oppressions and the erosion of the vital body in action.

And as the climate heats up and oil runs out, this recovery is going to be very important, more important perhaps than “alternative fuels” and the other modes of continuing down the motorized route rather than reclaiming the alternatives. I often find myself at odds with pedestrian and bicycle advocates who believe that infrastructure is everything; that if you build it they will come. I believe that most industrial-zone human beings need to rethink time, space and their own bodies before they will be equipped to be as urbane and as pedestrian (or at least nonmotorized) as their predecessors. Only in places like Manhattan and London do people—some people—seem to remember how to integrate public transit and their own legs into an effective, ethical and sometimes deeply pleasurable way of navigating the terrain of their daily lives.

While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act—so much for the Cartesian mind/body divide.

Spirituality and sexuality both enter in; the great walkers often move through both urban and rural places in the same way; and even past and present are brought together when you walk as the ancients did or relive some event in history or your own life by retracing its route. And each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience—so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do. This continuity is one of the things I think we lost in the industrial age—but we can choose to reclaim it, again and again, and some do. The fields and streets are waiting.

The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route.

The history of walking is everyone’s history, and any written version can only hope to indicate some of the more well-trodden paths in the author’s vicinity—which is to say, the paths I trace are not the only paths.

Henry David Thoreau, who walked more vigorously than me on the other side of the continent, wrote of the local, “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.”

I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because 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.

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.

Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.

This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and t...

A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking wer...

And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete—for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into t...

It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination.

Of course walking, as any reader of Thoreau’s essay “Walking” knows, inevitably leads into other subjects.

Although I came to think about walking, I couldn’t stop thinking about everything else, about the letters I should have been writing, about the conversations I’d been having.

We talked about the more stately sense of time one has afoot and on public transit, where things must be planned and scheduled beforehand, rather than rushed through at the last minute, and about the sense of place that can only be gained on foot.

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’s the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value. Both rural and urban walking have for two centuries been prime ways of exploring the unpredictable and the incalculable, but they are now under assault on many fronts.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them.

Even on this headland route going nowhere useful, this route that could only be walked for pleasure, people had trodden shortcuts between the switchbacks as though efficiency was a habit they couldn’t shake.

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.

Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.

Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in his Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning.

“Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is something about walking which stimulates and enlivens my thoughts.

If the literature of philosophical walking begins with Rousseau, it is because he is one of the first who thought it worthwhile to record in detail the circumstances of his musing.

If he inspired revolutions, revolutions in imagination and culture as well as in political organization, they were for him only necessary to overthrow the impediments to such experience.

In a memory he ascribes to one of his pseudonyms but which is almost certainly his own, he tells of how his father, rather than let him leave the house, would walk back and forth in a room with him, describing the world so vividly that the boy seemed to see all the variety evoked. As the boy grew older, his father let him join in: “What had at first been an epic now became a drama; they conversed in turn. If they were walking along well-known paths they watched one another sharply to make sure that nothing was overlooked; if the way was strange to Johannes, he invented something, whereas the father’s almighty imagination was capable of shaping everything, of using every childish whim as an ingredient of the drama. To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if the father were the Lord God and he was his favorite.”

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting. Walking provided Kierkegaard, like Rousseau, with a wealth of casual contacts with his fellow humans, and it facilitated contemplation.

“Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I am sitting alone in a large assemblage, when the tumult and noise require a substratum of will if the imagination is to hold on to its object; without this environment it bleeds to death in the exhausting embrace of an indefinite idea.”

The body, he said, is our experience of what is always here, and the body in motion experiences the unity of all its parts as the continuous “here” that moves toward and through the various “theres.” That is to say, it is the body that moves but the world that changes, which is how one distinguishes the one from the other: travel can be a way to experience this continuity of self amid the flux of the world and thus to begin to understand each and their relationship to each other.

Having been liberated from manual labor and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied.

“If the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all,” writes Susan Bordo, one feminist theorist at odds with this version of embodiment.

Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable, but walking itself extends into the world as do those tools that augment the body. The path is an extension of walking, the places set aside for walking are monuments to that pursuit, and walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it. Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire; walking sticks, shoes, maps, canteens, and backpacks are further material results of that desire. Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.