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Reading: Wanderlust
Apr. 22nd, 2018 06:28 pmI like reading books about walking, but often find the maleness of the travel writing genre dispiriting, along with the fact that so few walking books are actually about walking; far too many are about the stops along the way, rather than the walk itself, if they aren't about the writer's mid-life crisis or his marriage breakup or his relationship with his father or son (or, in the case of Simon Armitage's book about the Pennine Way, about the state of being a grumpy middle-aged man complaining about his feet hurting and failing to notice the amazing landscape he's walking through). Browsing in the walking section of Blackwell's recently I noticed Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust and thought it looked worth trying.
Subtitled "A History of Walking", Wanderlust isn't primarily a book about Solnit's personal experience of walking (although it does include some wonderful descriptions of walks she undertakes while researching and working on the book); it's a cultural history, examining the place of walking in the (predominantly Anglo-American) world of the last three centuries or so and the ways this is mirrored in literature and art. She begins by looking at the relationship between walking and philosophy, then moves on to theories of why humans might have evolved to walk upright, before considering different traditions of walking: pilgrimage, the Romantic passion for walking as a way of becoming closer to nature, the rise of mountaineering as a discipline, walking as a form of protest, the fight for access to the countryside, and then the particular implications of walking in urban rather than rural landscapes. Along the way, she addresses the reason why the walking genre is so male, looking at the history of repression and restriction which has prevented women from accessing public spaces with the same freedom as men have (and incidentally making me see the positioning of shopping as a key element of female culture in a whole new light when she talks about how a woman shopping was protected by her errand from the suspicions of being a prostitute cast on a woman walking the streets without a particular purpose); she also analyses the walks Elizabeth Bennett takes in Pride and Prejudice and what this says about women and walking in Austen's day. Finally, she moves on to look at the factors which have contributed to the decline of walking in Western societies at the end of the twentieth century (particularly in America, with its vast sprawling suburbs which are all but inaccessible to anyone without a car) and to consider walking as an antidote to the disembodiment and alienation of late capitalist culture.
I thought Wanderlust was a really interesting read, even if I wasn't equally interested in all the examples Solnit considers (I could have done with less Wordsworth, really) and thought there were some odd lacunae (who writes a history of walking without mentioning Paddy Leigh Fermor? Or is he just not known in America), and I liked the generally positive message about walking as a way to combat consumer culture. Most importantly, it did exactly what a book about walking should do: it made me want to walk more, and more thoughtfully, and that can't be a bad thing.
Subtitled "A History of Walking", Wanderlust isn't primarily a book about Solnit's personal experience of walking (although it does include some wonderful descriptions of walks she undertakes while researching and working on the book); it's a cultural history, examining the place of walking in the (predominantly Anglo-American) world of the last three centuries or so and the ways this is mirrored in literature and art. She begins by looking at the relationship between walking and philosophy, then moves on to theories of why humans might have evolved to walk upright, before considering different traditions of walking: pilgrimage, the Romantic passion for walking as a way of becoming closer to nature, the rise of mountaineering as a discipline, walking as a form of protest, the fight for access to the countryside, and then the particular implications of walking in urban rather than rural landscapes. Along the way, she addresses the reason why the walking genre is so male, looking at the history of repression and restriction which has prevented women from accessing public spaces with the same freedom as men have (and incidentally making me see the positioning of shopping as a key element of female culture in a whole new light when she talks about how a woman shopping was protected by her errand from the suspicions of being a prostitute cast on a woman walking the streets without a particular purpose); she also analyses the walks Elizabeth Bennett takes in Pride and Prejudice and what this says about women and walking in Austen's day. Finally, she moves on to look at the factors which have contributed to the decline of walking in Western societies at the end of the twentieth century (particularly in America, with its vast sprawling suburbs which are all but inaccessible to anyone without a car) and to consider walking as an antidote to the disembodiment and alienation of late capitalist culture.
I thought Wanderlust was a really interesting read, even if I wasn't equally interested in all the examples Solnit considers (I could have done with less Wordsworth, really) and thought there were some odd lacunae (who writes a history of walking without mentioning Paddy Leigh Fermor? Or is he just not known in America), and I liked the generally positive message about walking as a way to combat consumer culture. Most importantly, it did exactly what a book about walking should do: it made me want to walk more, and more thoughtfully, and that can't be a bad thing.
