Forrest’s Reviews > Wanderlust: A History of Walking > Status Update

The entanglement between Solnit and Benjamin continues, Baudelaire watching again from the periphery, sometimes circling one, then the other, then weaving between them like a child at play. How strange that I should be reading these two books, with seemingly no connection between them, on the surface, at the same time. This might be a sign to reread Flowers of Evil.

What an amazing synchronicity! I'm reading Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire in Illuminations, I turn the page in Solnit's work and what is there? A beautiful paragraph about Benjamin in Paris and his work on an unwritten book "on the linked subjects of Baudelaire, Paris, the Parisian arcades, and the figure of the flâneur". My reading has created a pocket universe!

Back on the trail with this book. The irony is that while I was on vacation in Europe, I walked further in a week than I would walking seven or eight weeks here in the US.