Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust, A History of Walking.

In her book Wanderlust, American writer, historian and activisit, Rebecca Solnit covers much the same ground as Federic Gros in his book, The Philosophy of Walking, however, whereas Gros writes mainly about philosophers and their thoughts, Solnit focuses on the subjects history.  I found it an illuminating and enjoyable read.  Will Self describes it in the Guardian as magisterial and The Times says It is about time and space and consciousness of the world as much as about putting one foot in front of the other.  The Telegraph describes it as a lovable book that makes you look anew at something so familiar.  Solnit winningly traces the shifting cultural significance of putting one foot in front of another.

The book begins with the early philosophers and their experiences of walking before moving on to discuss pilgrimage, labyrinths and mazes and the religious significance and history of these. She describes how walking, particularly in England became the pastime and exercise for the landed gentry who could walk in private in their walled gardens and estates, which were often landscaped to provide idealized picturesque views.  Next the discussion moves 'out of the garden' with Wordsworth and his contemporaries who first walked in the open countryside, often over prodigious distances.  They made walking into something new.  In America Thoreau filled a similar niche.  Walking in mountains is discussed in this section of the book and along with it John Muir and The Sierra Club.  The story next moves in to the city where the derive and flaneurism are discussed along with the likes of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, the Situationists and the beginnings of Psychgeography.  The problems of walking for women are introduced and the risks they took to their safety and reputation.  Solnit reaches the end of her book by talking about the rise of the suburbs and consequent decline in walking in cities and she discusses the Las Vegas 'Strip' as a special case before finally concluding on a not of optimism for walking.

Below are bullet points from the book which resonated most with me.:-

• The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets and almost everyone's adventures.
• The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking.
• I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works best at 3 mph.
• Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
• Jean-Jaques Rouseau 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."
• Rousseau stands at its beginning.
• The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world" in his 1931 essay. (see link for blog on this.)
• Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.
• Walking came from Africa, from man's evolution and his journey out of Africa. Ref Out of Eden Walk.
• Pilgrimage is one of the fundamental structures a journey can take.
• Pilgrimage is almost universally embedded in human culture as a literal means of spiritual journey, and asceticism and physical exertion are almost universally understood as a means of spiritual development.
• In the experience of walking, each step is a thought.
• A labyrinth is a symbolic journey...but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and the world.
• Travels are stories and stories are travels.
• Wordsworth and his companions are said to have made walking into something new and thereby to have founded the whole lineage of those who walk for its own sake and for the pleasure of being in the landscape from which so much has sprung.
• Though Wordsworth is in some sense the founding father of a modern taste....he himself was heir to a long tradition, and so it is more accurate to see him as a transformer.
• Wordsworth and Jones had charted their journey (through the Alps) with care, however, and walked about 30 miles a day in order to carry out their ambitions plans. (A phenomenal distance I am currently walking the Viking Way long distance footpath and cover on average 15 -20 miles a day!)
• Walking seems to have provided literal common ground between those travelling to seek adventure and pleasure and those on the road to seek survival.
• Thoreau wrote "When we walk we naturally go to the woods and fields.  What would become of us if we walked only in a garden or mall?"
• The taste for nature already entrenched in Thoreau's time and magnified in our own has a peculiar history, one that has made nature itself cultural.
• Nature, which had been an aesthetic cult in the 18th century and became a radical cult at the end of that century, was by the middle of the next an established religion for the middle classes.
• Going out into nature was a devout act for those English, American and Central European heirs of romanticism and transcendentalism.
• "A walking tour should be gone on alone!" R.L.Stevenson
• Gentlemen, I say, because all writers on walking seem to belong to the same club......a kind of implicit club of the same background.  They are generally privileged, Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard educated and of a vaguely clerical bent.
• Walking women are anomalies.
• The first significant account of a lond distance walk for the sake of walking is John Muir's Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf.
• The South he (Muir) walked through was an open wound stil festering after the civil war.....historians must be frustrated by Muir's neglect of social observation for the sake of botanizing...The wilderness writings make him a kind of John the Baptist come back from a suddenly appealing wilderness to preach to the rest of us. (wilderness only because its indigenous inhabitants had been forcibly removed and decimated before Muir arrived...)
• Since the 18th cewntury, nature has been imagined as scenery (landscape.)
• Mountains have been seen around the world as thresholds between this world and the next, as places where the spirit world comes close.
• Gary Snyder (mountaineer and poet) seems to unite the spiritual and secular traditions.....I was given a chance to see how walking the landscape can become both ritual and meditation.
• ....certainly they do, along with a few million others every year in Yosemite National Park, one of the most famous and heavily visited natural places in the world.
• In 1890 Muir and a few friends began meeting to discuss defending Yosemite from the developers who sought to raid its timber and mineral resources.
• Eventually it became clear that recreation was destroying Yosemite Valley almost as much as resource extraction had destroyed the Hetch-Hetchy Valley by damming it as a reservoir for San Francisco during WW1
• Muir was the most influential member then, but the (Sierra) Club would later become a home for the men who invented American nature photography: Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter - and for many who redefined American wilderness in both law and imagination.
• The members of the Sierra Club had imported their taste for nature (from Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Wordsworth).
• Environmental awareness and the Sierra Club grew up together.
• "We were shocked at first to discover first hand that the taste for wilderness was culturally determined, a privilege enjoyed only by the sons and daughters of a certain comfortable class of Americans.
• Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning........Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations.  Walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property (Ref Private notice in Ass 4 image).
• One of the pleasures of walking in England is the sense of cohabitation that rights of way paths create - of crossing stiles into sheep fields and skirting the edges of crops that is both utilitarian and aesthetic. Not in the USA though.
• The word street has a dirty magic to it....A Man of the Street...A Woman of the Street is like a street walker, a seller of her sexuality.....Street Urchins....Take to the Streets.
• For Italians says Rudolsky, the street is the pivotal social space for meeting, debating, courting, buying, selling .... of the Passaggiata.
• London of the 1700s was a dangerous place to walk the streets.
• Until the 20th century women seldom walked the streets of London for their own pleasure.
• Walter Benjamin is one of the great scholars of cities and the art of walking in them, and Paris drew him into its recesses....
• Chapter 12, Paris, Walter Benjamin et al, Flaneuism, Guy Debord, Situationists, Psychogeography, Derive.
• Chapter 13 Walking as part of demonstrations and revolutions through history.
• Women's presence in public becomes with startling frequency an invasion of their private parts, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally.
• Travel, whether local or global, has remained a largely masculine perogative, with women often the destination, the prize or keepers of the hearth.
• But walking alone also has enormous spiritual, cultural and political resonanave.  It has been a major part of meditation, prayer and religious exploration.
• 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. i.e women.
• .....for like Odysseus, Kerouac was a travelling man in a landscape of immobile women.
• The history of walking is a history of cities and countryside.
• The modern suberb is antithetical to the walking city.
• Walking to school, which was for generations the great formative first foray alone into the world, is likewise becoming a less common experience. Ref Cars and the school run.
• P249-P266 document the fall in the popularity of walking/outdoor exercise and the lack of space to do it and the rise of the gym as a replacement exercise and space.  We get into cars to drive to a gym to then walk/run on a treadmill.
• One new realm of walking opened up in the 1960s was walking as art.
• Earth Art.
• Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, a walkable art work in the Great Salt Lake.
• Richard Long
• Hamish Fulton
• It seemed to me that if walking could suddenly revive in this most inhospitable and unlikely place, it had some kind of a future, and that by walking the )(Vegas) Strip myself I might find out what that future was.
• These places are mutant reprises of the landscape in which as scenic pleasure was developed, Vegas has become the successor to Vauxhall, Ranelagh and all the other pleasure gardens of the past.
• Walking traditions are maintained by the resurgence of the foot pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella in Spain and the thriving one in Chimayo, New Mexico, the growing popularity of climbing and mountaineering, the artists working with walking as a medium and the writers with it as a means, the spread of Buddhism with its practices of walking meditation and circumambulation of mountains, the new found secular and religious enthusiasm for labyrinths and mazes....
• Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them - drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes - that makes them a constellation.
• This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are still travelled.