Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit opens Wanderlust with a physical description of walking, muscles tensing and weight shifting, before arguing that this ordinary bodily act extends into philosophy, religion, politics, and landscape. She frames the book as an "amateur history" that trespasses across many disciplines. On a familiar six-mile route through the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, she thinks through her subject, recalling how her interest in walking originated in antinuclear activism at the Nevada Test Site in the 1980s, where ceremonial processions across forbidden boundaries united poetry with politics. She argues that walking is under assault from technologies that accelerate life, from the erosion of public space, and from suburban designs that render pedestrian activity impractical.

The book's first part traces the philosophical tradition linking walking with thinking. Solnit identifies the 18th-century Swiss-French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau as standing at the beginning of the history of walking as a conscious cultural act: He declared that his mind only worked when his legs were moving. She notes that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's school was called "Peripatetic" after its covered walkway, or peripatos, linking thinking and walking through architecture and language. Rousseau's equation of nature and simplicity with goodness made walking an emblem of the virtuous individual, and his late work Reveries of a Solitary Walker became one of the first portraits of the associative relationship between thinking and walking. Solnit pairs Rousseau with the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who used Copenhagen's streets as his "reception room" and composed all his works while walking amid public life.

Solnit then examines how upright walking made humans human. She explains that bipedalism, walking upright on two legs, is considered the transformation that separated early hominids from other primates, eventually freeing the hands for tool use and enabling larger brains. She recounts key discoveries: the Piltdown Man hoax, believed from 1908 to 1950; anatomist Raymond Dart's genuine 1924 find of the Taung child skull in South Africa, which showed that walking preceded large brains; and paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's 1974 discovery of the "Lucy" skeleton in Ethiopia. Anatomist Owen Lovejoy's theory that bipedalism arose so males could carry food to monogamous, stay-at-home females drew criticism from feminist anthropologist Dean Falk, who argued the hypothesis projected modern anxieties onto evolutionary history. Solnit notes the widespread but unsupported claim in evolutionary literature that women are worse walkers than men.

Pilgrimage occupies a central place in Solnit's history. She describes joining a Good Friday walk to the Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico, where devotees collect holy earth believed to have curative powers. She explains how pilgrimage makes spiritual goals tangible through physical labor, creating a spiritual economy in which effort is rewarded. She traces how the form has been adapted: Peace Pilgrim began a 28-year walking pilgrimage for peace across the United States in 1953; Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement drew on Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March to create political marches from Selma to Montgomery and the March on Washington; and filmmaker Werner Herzog walked from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit the gravely ill film historian Lotte Eisner, believing she would survive if he came on foot.

Solnit explores how walking enters the symbolic realm through structures that unite bodily movement with narrative. She recounts walking the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and discovering that the moment you seem farthest from your destination is when you suddenly arrive, "a very pat truth in words, but a profound one to find with your feet" (70). She draws an analogy between paths and stories, both of which unfold in time and can only be perceived by traversing them, and connects this to Renaissance sculpture gardens and the ancient technique of the memory palace, in which information is stored in an imagined building and retrieved by walking through its rooms.

The book's second part traces walking for aesthetic pleasure from English gardens to Romantic poetry. Solnit argues this practice developed gradually over the 16th through 18th centuries, as garden innovations like the ha-ha, an invisible boundary ditch, dissolved the distinction between garden and landscape. She uses Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as an index of walking's many uses: Its heroine Elizabeth Bennet walks for exercise, conversation, transportation, and independence. William Wordsworth occupies the book's gravitational center. Solnit cites essayist Thomas De Quincey's estimate that Wordsworth walked 175,000 to 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poetry while pacing a 12-pace garden terrace and speaking verses aloud. Wordsworth's 1790 walking tour across France and the Alps departed radically from the Grand Tour, the customary carriage journey through Europe undertaken by upper-class young men.

Solnit surveys the literature of walking, critiquing the essay tradition from William Hazlitt through Bruce Chatwin for its persistent moralizing and its assumption that the walker is a privileged male. Her chapter on mountaineering traces the sport from the 18th-century competition to summit Mont Blanc through the golden age of Alpine climbing (1854–1865) and contrasts its epic tradition with quieter practices, including the Japanese Buddhist mountaineering sect Shugendō and poet Gary Snyder's synthesis of Eastern spirituality with Western mountaineering.

Solnit examines walking clubs as political organizations. The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, combined mountaineering with environmental preservation. The Naturfreunde (Nature Friends), founded in Vienna in 1895 by socialists, challenged aristocratic monopolies on Alpine access. In Britain, the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass, where 400 ramblers defied gamekeepers and six were jailed, helped lead to the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. Solnit argues that walking traces a democratic arc from aristocratic garden strolls to mass trespasses, making walking the antithesis of owning.

The book's third part turns to cities. Solnit explores urban walking in London through the novelist Charles Dickens's nocturnal prowls and Virginia Woolf's 1930 essay "Street Haunting," in which walking becomes a joyful shedding of identity. She surveys New York's walking poets, including Walt Whitman celebrating the crowd and Frank O'Hara composing lunch-hour poems organized by the syntax of strolls. Paris receives extended treatment. Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, devoted his final decade to studying the flâneur, the observant male stroller of 19th-century Paris. Solnit examines Baron Haussmann's remodeling of Paris (1853–1870), the surrealist walking books of the 1920s, and the ideas of Guy Debord, a theorist of the Situationist movement, which used urban experience as political critique. Debord's concept of psychogeography, the study of how urban environments shape emotions and behavior, sought to make walking a subversive practice. Cultural theorist Michel de Certeau similarly argued that walkers are "practitioners of the city" who speak the language of its streets.

Solnit examines collective walking as political speech, from the October 1789 march of market women to Versailles through the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, who beginning in 1977 walked weekly around an obelisk to publicize their children's disappearance under Argentina's military dictatorship. Her chapter on women and walking argues that women's freedom to walk has been restricted through the regulation of public space and the control of female sexuality, tracing this pattern from ancient Middle Assyria through 19th-century European laws to Solnit's own experience of discovering at 19 that she had no guaranteed right to safety outdoors.

The book's final part argues that suburbanization and automobiles have endangered walking, proposing it as an "indicator species" whose decline signals the erosion of free time and free space. Solnit examines the treadmill as a paradoxical compensation for lost everyday walking, connecting it to its 1818 origins as a prison punishment device. She surveys walking as a medium for contemporary art, from Richard Long's 1967 A Line Made by Walking through Marina Abramović and Ulay's 1988 Great Wall Walk, in which two performance artists walked toward each other from opposite ends of China's Great Wall, transforming a wall of separation into a road of connection. The book concludes on the Las Vegas Strip, where theme-park casinos function as descendants of European pleasure gardens while authorities battle to privatize sidewalks. Solnit closes by defining walking as a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, asking whether the paths connecting them will continue to be traveled.