Wanderlust

I finally finished Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: A History of Walking yesterday afternoon. It’s a tremendous book, one that manages to be both broad in scope and deeply attentive to details at the same time–the kind of book that makes you wonder just how its author came to know so much and think so clearly.

Wanderlust is not just a history, although the subtitle describes it as one. The topics Solnit covers range from the anthropological debates about the role walking played in making humans into humans to the pilgrimage to Chimayó in New Mexico, to the history of gardening and William Wordsworth’s legs (the fact that he was an inveterate walker escaped me in the course I took on Romantic poetry so many years ago), to the fight for access to public lands in Britain and elsewhere. There are chapters on walking in the city (with an obligatory discussion of Walter Benjamin and the flâneur) and the way that the freedom to walk is not equally distributed, something I was reminded of recently when an acquaintance from the Filmpool, Simon Ash Moccasin, went public with a story about being beaten up by the police here for the crime of Walking While Aboriginal. The last chapters, which focus on walking in contemporary North America, a place not always hospitable to that activity, are particularly thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed the discussion of walking as an art form, which helped clarify some of my responses to the work of Richard Long, which I’ve discussed in this blog before.

Solnit’s notes and sources have pointed the way to more books about walking–as if I’ll have time for extracurricular reading now that the winter semester has begun. I also found myself wondering about the feasibility of the pilgrimage from Denver to Chimayó, a village near Santa Fé. I heard about that in Spain but didn’t know much about it until I read Solnit’s discussion of the annual Easter pilgrimage. I’ll put it on the list of walks I’d like to take someday.

I started Wanderlust in the summer and put it aside before we went to England. I’m glad I picked it up again this Christmas and I’m looking forward to reading Solnit’s other work. So many books to read and so little time to do it.