Wanderlust: A History of Walking Book

I bought this on a whim, after being stunned by the ethereal beauty and insight of A Field Guide to Getting Lost this summer, which I reviewed HERE.

This is good, but more ordinarily so. If you want a literate non-fiction book about the history and philosophy of walking, this may be for you. It turns out that I don't. But it's not her; it's me.
Hence, this "review" is just notes on pages 1 to 103 of 291.

Thinking Points

Walking the way we do is uniquely human. Other bipedal creatures have wings or tails, or they hop or jump. It frees our hands, but the resulting changes to the human pelvis limit the size of a babies' heads, so could ultimately cap our intelligence!

Image: Evolution of human skeleton to bipedalism (Source.)

"Walking begins as delayed falling and the fall meets with the Fall."
That reminded me of a favourite line from Life, the Universe and Everything that the knack of flying is "to throw yourself at the ground and miss".

Walking "as a conscious cultural act" is a remarkably modern phenomenon. First, there were the formal gardens of the eighteenth century, where those who didn't need to work could exercise (gently) on land not needed for cultivating food.


Image: Lady in a Garden by Edmund Leighton (Source.)

In Jane Austen's novels:
"Walking provided shared seclusion for crucial conversations"
I sometimes find that true myself - though it can be just as true of a car journey or a private meal.

Later, William and Dorothy Wordsworth wrote eloquently about their walks/hikes in the Lake District. They inspired other poets, painters, the start of scenic tourism, and the rise of the word "picturesque".


Image: Inspirational daffodils at Glenconyne Bay, Ullswater (Source.)

Any sort of walking grounds us in the world more than sitting or using external transport, it becomes a means and an end.
"Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them."

Transport technology minimises unstructured travel time, but disconnects us from each other, and the world.
"Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors… disconnected from each other."

Pilgrimage is a very specific walk where the end to some extent is the means. But the inherent metaphor of travel, travail, journey through life, is one we all relate to, and common to many religions, especially Buddhism.

Memory palaces are a well-worn technique for remembering things by imagining a walk. Most of us rely more on books (or the internet) as repositories of information, but the patterns are similar.

Walking can be a liminal state, between one's past and future identities.

"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape."
But there isn't always one answer: a maze has many routes, but a labyrinth just one.
"The maze offers the confusions of free will without a clear destination, the labyrinth an inflexible route to salvation."

Features

* A new intro where Solnit brings her nearly 20-year old book more up-to-date, with mention mass protest marches, the obesity epidemic, climate change, and public transport.
* It's dense and detailed, but helpfully chunked into four sections, each of which comprises three to five titled subsections.
* Comprehensive index.
* References and sources of everyone/thing cited - 26 small-print pages of them.
* A single line of quote-after-quote along the bottom of all the pages. You don't know the source until you reach the end of each one, maybe several pages later.