What do You think about Wanderlust: A History Of Walking (2002)?
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.
—Erik Graff
Combining sharp analysis and reverie is no small matter, but then Solnit is very, very good. Her rhapsodies never preclude wry intrusions of reality, and while she's evangelistic about the benefits of walking, she also includes a chapter on the various reasons of race, gender &c which can too easily make it a much less attractive proposition. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Paris, which supported my own experience that the cradle of the flaneur is now an automobile-friendly sepulchre. Reading this book inspired me to stride off on a half-baked navigation during which I almost fell into a badger sett, and there's not many books of which you can say that.
—Alex Sarll
This is not a travelogue. I thought the book would be a Bryson-esque piece of travel writing, with the author taking the reader on a set of strolls, accompanied by musings on great walkers of history, tit-bits of information, some anecdotes, and an analysis of being a flaneuse. But it's a serious history of walking – as Solnit sets out in the introduction, the history of walking is about: “religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory and heartbreak”, from the original bipeds who started walking upright in order to carry food and/or keep more of their bodies out of the sun, to the ancient Greeks who invented the walk 'n' talk, Jesus, whose long walk to Golgotha inspired pilgrimages and protest marches, Rousseau, the first person, pace Solnit, to walk for leisure, Wordsworth, the first person to walk for pleasure (Dorothy Wordsworth walked everywhere William did, but with shorter legs and less muscle tone). Solnit makes the point that before the 18th century, walking was for peasants, itinerants and thieves – a bit like LA now – and we may think that leisure walking is a natural activity, but she claims it as a cultural one, invented by the Romantics and picked up by the Victorians as a way of being cultured. She also covers early female explorers, the right to roam movement and the Kinder Scout mass trespass (although I did scoff at her insistence that the Lake District is near the Peak District. I'm not sure that Derbyshire folk and Cumbrians would agree), the city flaneurs: Dickens, Woolf and Walter Benjamin (there are only a few lines on Baudelaire and his flaneurie, but having read a 165 page chapter about Charles B in The Arcades Project, I think you can have too much of a good thing), the French Revolution (1.0), which, contrary to belief, didn't start in July 1789 but three months later when market women, laundresses, fishwives etc marched on Versailles, leading to Louis' leaving), and recent street walking activity: Reclaim The Streets, critical mass etc. She ends with a plea not just for space for walking, but a critique of the suburbanisation of everywhere, where there car is king, where there is no town centre for citizens to congregate or mingle, loiter or loll.To my mind, the most interesting chapter is Walking After Midnight, a discourse on solitary female perambulation, Women have always joined walking groups, walked in pairs, and so forth, but solitary walking is considered suspect, especially at night. After falling victim to a particularly nasty piece of street harassment she writes: “It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness out-of-doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wish to harm me for no other reason than my gender...and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem. I was advised to stay indoors at night.....to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me....all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behaviour, rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realised that so many women had been so successfully socialised to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realising why.” Every time I see a single woman out on her own after dark, I want to give her the thumbs up.
—Rachel Stevenson
