Wanderlust: A History of Walking
- Mar 7, 2021
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
I think I feel most at home on a trail—walking stick in hand, brisk pace or casual amble, brief jaunt or lengthy hike, journey or destination in mind, accompanied or alone (though I generally prefer the latter for the solitude and the opportunity for reflection or pondering or meditation or disconnecting as the mood demands)—whether in canopied woods, open prairies, high-walled canyons, breathtaking mountains, or backcountry deserts. I moved to Manhattan, Kansas, amidst the tallgrass prairie west of town for, amongst other things (including a dream job), the need to be closer to trails, to nature—to be in it, of it, to embody and be embodied, to spend my days taking care so I could be taken care of. It’s only natural, then, that I should have found myself drawn to Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
Of course, hiking is but one kind of walking, and Solnit covers its origins along with bipedalism in its many forms and functions over the centuries: for sophists and peripatetics, philosophers and writers, pilgrims and protesters, flâneurs and prostitutes, painters and performance artists; inside walled gardens, down country lanes, through unexplored wilds, up mountains, along boulevards, down city streets; for pleasure, for privacy, for courtship, for commerce, for recreation, for exercise. It’s all here and it’s all interesting and within its many chapters there’s something for everyone who likes to get out and explore the world at three miles per hour.
But a book that covers as much ground as Wanderlust does, save for a rarefied few, is bound to have too much of one thing and not enough of another. There are as many reasons to get out (or stay in, for the treadmillers out there) and walk as there are walkers and, as such, there are as many reasons to find joy and disappointment herein. Part of the blame lies with Solnit, who has assembled a laudatory, if uneven, collection of essays, and part of the blame lies with me, who, in practice, can appreciate a walk for the journey while foregoing the destination but could not do the same in reading about it. Too often, I kept anticipating the arrival rather than savoring the trip. Perhaps that’s the difference between taking a walk and reading about one. Perhaps that’s the difference between what I want from a walk and what I need from a book. Or perhaps some histories of walking—or Solnit’s encounters with them—are simply more interesting than others.
In the end, I just want to go for a walk. If Wanderlust inspires anyone else to want the same, then Solnit has done her job, if that was her intention at all (and I think it was): “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.” Yes.
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