Side treks include Thoreau’s “Walking,” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in a Fictional Wood. Along the way, she offers numerous side trails to explore introducing works by walking philosophers and the genre of the walking essay. Solnit examines the spirituality, history, literature, and political implications of walking. “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.” Wanderlust falls into the latter category, but it is the pick for EcoLit readers. A Paradise Built in Hell), fascinating if the topic interests.
There are her lyrically written, inventive essays (the extremely beautiful The Faraway Nearby for example) and her obsessively researched academic books (i.e. Solnit writes a couple of different kind of books. “Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.” Solnit reminds us that walking is an intellectual, spiritual, and revolutionary pursuit and can be a creative and empowering act.
The journey is enjoyable and ultimately rewarding.īest of all, this book will make you want to get out into the world and walk.
Along the way, the book catches your attention with a beautiful point of insight or takes you to a soaring vista. At times, you may wonder what you have gotten yourself into, but you happily trek on. 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.Reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) is a lot like talking a hike. 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? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act.
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