All rights reservedĪ luminous study of a little-considered but essential human capability. 'Language is like a road,' she writes 'it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.' Agent: Bonnie Nadell. The relationship between walking and thought and its expression in words is the underlying theme to which she repeatedly returns. Her book captures, in the ease and cadences of its prose, the rhythms of a good walk. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas-or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since 'Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking.' Inevitably, as these words suggest, Solnit's focus isn't pedestrianism's past but its prognosis-the way in which the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from 'automobilization and suburbanization.' Familiar as that message sounds, Solnit delivers it without the usual ecological and ideological pieties. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. Walking, says Solnit (Savage Dreams A Book of Migrations), is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction, from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja, Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.

Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. A reissue of the profound and meandering modern classic about the historical, political and philosophical paths traced by walkers, their routes and the act of walking itself.

Rebecca solnit a history of walking