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---
title: Wanderlust A History of Walking
author: Rebecca Solnit
pubyear: 2000
edition: Penguin Books
readdate: September 25, 2014 03:47:50 PM
tags: non-fiction
---
This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage,one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and.that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete -- for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. Walking can also be imagined as a visual activity, every walk a tour leisurely enough both to see and to think over the sights, to assimilate the new into the known. Perhaps this is where walking's peculiar utility for thinkers comes from. The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind and what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination
page: 6
notes: I like this passage as the basis for a luxagraf post. That you can travel all around the world without going anywhere at all. This notions that "a certain kind of wanderlust ca only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of a car... etc". Reminiscent of Edward Abbey's advice: "you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the...cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
--
Although I came to think about walking, I couldn't stop thinking about everything else, about the letters I should have been writing, about the conversations I'd been having. At least when my mind strayed to the phone conversation with my friend Sono that morning, I was still on track. Sono's truck had been stolen from her West Oakland studio, and she told me that though everyone responded to it as a disaster, she wasn't all that sorry it was gone, or in a hurry to replace it. There was a joy, she said, to finding that her body was adequate to get her Where she was going, and it was a gift to develop a more tangible, Concrete relationship to her neighborhood and its residents. We talked about the more stately sense of time one has afoot and on public transit, where things must be planned and scheduled beforehand, rather than rushed through at the last minute, and about the sense of place that can only be gained on foot. Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors -- home, car, gym, office, shops -- disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the while world rather than in interiors built up against it.
page: 9
notes: I like the point about walking and public transit requiring more planning and that that can be better than "rushing" through. usually i think of it as the opposite, that the necessary planning and leaving early is a disadvantage of walking and public transit. also love the disconnected spaces. fits with the other idea below that to never arrive is just as half-a-journey as rushing through the journey without looking around.
--
Four-legged animals are as stable as a table when all four feet are on the ground, but humans are already precariously balanced on two be-fore they begin to move. Even standing still is a feat of balance, as anyone who has watched or been a drunk knows.
page: 32-33
--
Reading the accounts of human walking, it is easy to begin to think of the Fall in terms of the falls, the innumerable spills, possible for a suddenly upright creature that must balance all its shifting weight on a single foot as it moves:, John 2Napier, in an essay on the ancient origins of walking, wrote, "Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe... Man's bipedal mode of walking seems potentially catastrophic because only the rhythmic forward movement of first one leg and then the other keeps him from falling flat on his face." This is easiest to see in small children for whom the many aspects that will later unite seamlessly into walking are still distinct and awkward. They learn to walk by flirting with falling—they lean forward with their body and then rush to keep their legs under that body. Their plump bowed legs always seem to be lagging behind or catching up, and they often tumble into frustration before they master the art. Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfill for them: the desire for that which is out of reach,for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the Fall. Genesis may seem out of place in a discussion of science, but it is often the scientists who have dragged it in with them, unwittingly or otherwise. The scientific stories are as much an attempt to account for who we are as any creation myth and some of them seem to hark back to the central creation myth of Western culture, that business of Adam and Eve in the Garden.
page: 33
notes: connected to the quote above. really like the bit about children, which is 100 percent true with my experience watching the girls grow up and learn to walk. it's a controlled fall for some time and it always starts with the desire to get something that no one will get for them. Walking is autonomy at this point, or if you will, the first steps toward autonomy.
--
There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will.
page: 50
notes:
--
the children's books that I loved best were full of characters falling into books and pictures that became real, wandering through gardens where the statues came to life and, most famously, crossing over to the other side of the mirror, where chess pieces, flowers, and animals all were alive and temperamental. These books suggested that the boundaries between the real and the represented were not particularly fixed, and magic happened when one crossed over.
page: 70
notes: had never really thought about it, but the books i loved as a child also fit this pattern, the narnia books fall into a picture, alice and wonderland obviously, others as well.
--
Climbing is about climbing. Mountaineering, on the other hand, is still amount mountains
page: 134
--
as the great surveyor and mountaineer Clarence King recounts, when in 1871 he got to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous forty-eight states, he found that "a small mound of rock was piled on the peak, and solidly built into it an arrow-shaft, pointing due west." Mountains attracted attention and long before romanticism spawned mountaineering.
page: 135
--
Though Europeans led to world in the development of modern mountaineering, that mountaineering came out of romanticism's recovery of an appreciation for natural places that much of the rest of the world had never lost
page: 135
notes: of course it did, only white people are so fucked up as to believe that mountains would "high and hideous", "rubbish of the earth" and so on. The rest of the world wasn't so stupid. Wish that Solnit had citations for those quotes.
--
the mountains so frequently portrayed in Chinese poetry and paintings were a contemplative retreat from politics and society. In China, wandering was celebrated -- "To 'wander' is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic," writes a scholar -- but arriving was sometimes regarded with ambiguity. One of the eighth-century poet Li Po's compositions is titled "On Visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T'ien Mountains and Not Finding Him," a common theme in Chinese poetry then.
page: 144
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