She analyses the act of wandering as a philosophical and bodily occupation, but, above all else, Solnit conceives walking as the manner we have chosen to reclaim the world. She reflects on walking as an optional activity, since until recently it was necessary to walk in order to get from one point to the next, and how it is narrowly related to the English literature of the eighteenth century and to gardens.
Her history is essentially a cultural perspective where modern thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard and Longfellow, comprise its core. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.’
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. Solnit mentions that ‘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. With her book she guides us down a series of paths that cross physical territories and those of the mind an intertwining of planes that evokes precisely what happens when set out for a stroll. Solnit clarifies that what she presents in the book is a story, but not the story of this activity. Her book explores the act of walking, something that is impossible to encompass, but since the subject has no end, and neither does its practice, we are all partakers. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.Wanderlust: A History of Walking is the most recent book by American author and winner of the Guggenheim’s National Critic’s Circle, Rebecca Solnit. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. Description A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Rosesĭrawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking.
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