Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit (Verso, £17, 326pp)

Review by Ken Worpole

04 August 2001

At a recent seminar on transport policy in London, a play organiser described a pilot project to launch the Government's Home Zones scheme, based on an idea imported from the Netherlands. An inner-city residential street was closed to traffic one Saturday, and play equipment and refreshments were provided by local parents and play organisations. All day long the street buzzed with noise and life. At dusk, however, an older resident asked the organiser, "Where did you find the children?"

In the past 20 years or so, it seems as if some ghostly Pied Piper has spirited away the children from the streets of Britain -- a displacement even more pronounced in North America, to the extent where their presence, when it occurs, is regarded as a sign of trouble. Partly this is the result of the disastrous priorities of 20th-century urban planning, illustrated by the words of one Los Angeles planner cited in Rebecca Solnit's engaging new history of walking. He asserted that, "The pedestrian remains the largest single obstacle to free traffic movement." In the war between the car and the walker in the modern city, the car clearly seems to have won.

Rebecca Solnit's book is partisan on these issues. For her, walking -- or bipedality, as the evolutionists she cites prefer to call it -- is the defining characteristic of human development (and human exceptionalism), related to the development of thinking itself. While exploring almost every aspect of walking -- from medieval pilgrimages to modern protest marches, from the back-to-nature Wandervogel movement to fin-de-siècle street-walking, and from colonialist travel-writing to the Zen poetics of the Black Mountain School -- Solnit returns constantly to the connections between different kinds of walking and the characteristic mentalities which they engender.

The walker-philosopher is, after all, a key figure of the Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted in his Confessions that he could "meditate only when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs". Wordsworth, Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Kierkegaard were among other famous meditative walkers -- captured artistically in the Rückenfigur, the lone wanderer so frequently at the centre of the paintings of the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich.

In the late 20th century, this connection is still asserted: the French structuralist Jean-Christophe Bailly has spoken of a generative grammar of the legs (grammaire generative des jambes), while his compatriot Michel de Certeau believes that: "The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language." Just as the woods and hills are best explored, and their mysteries penetrated, by foot, so too are the streets and enclaves of the city.

Solnit distinguishes between the tradition of peripatetic meditation in enclosed spaces, exemplified by the Greek sophists and the later monastic tradition, with that of the unbounded walk which, like life itself, has no pre-determined pattern or teleology. It is the latter kind of walking which is the principal subject of this book, inspired by Thoreau's belief that, "When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we only walked in a garden or a mall?" Modern mall-walkers might profitably ask themselves the same question.

Thoreau was the key progenitor of the idea that life, metaphorically, might best be regarded as a walk through unknown country. While acknowledging the spiritual function of the religious pilgrimage, he preferred to emphasise a utopian sense of limitless possibility and rugged free will which emerged from a walk on the wilder side of nature. By the end of the 19th century, walking was becoming an essential part of early environmental and radical movements such as the Sierra Club in America (whose early slogan, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints) is still widely propagated), the Naturfreunde in Germany, and the Clarion Clubs in Britain.

In Germany, walking took on almost mystical associations, and one literary masterpiece of this period -- uncharacteristically overlooked by Solnit -- is Robert Walser's 1917 novella The Walk. Its lyrical, digressive rhythms remain evident in the work of two other great German-speaking writers of more recent times, Thomas Bernhard and W G Sebald.

Along with a number of other modern American writers on environmental issues, such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, J B Jackson and Anne Whiston Spirn, Solnit writes with an engaging and literate passion. In one of many perceptive phrases, she fears that "modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness". Thoughtfulness is the quality Solnit seeks through the promotion of walking, echoing one of Wittgenstein's remarks that in the race of philosophy, the prize goes to the slowest.

There are many inspiring stories here of heroic walking-feats, including that of the American "Peace Pilgrim", an anonymous woman who set out on 1 January 1953. She vowed to "remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace", and carried on crossing and criss-crossing America for the next 28 years, trusting to the kindness of strangers to shelter and feed her, until she was killed in a head-on car crash after a sympathiser had picked her up to take her to a speaking engagement.

Solnit is especially interested in the culture of the pilgrimage or freedom march, which in North America has been a characteristic form of political commitment. As a result, she is more confident and original when considering the work of American poets (and devoted walkers) such as Gary Snyder and Frank O'Hara than in retelling the familiar stories of the walking expeditions made by Coleridge or Wordsworth in pursuit of their muse.

Towards the end of this stimulating book, Solnit reflects on the similarities between the treadmill and the punitive exercise machines now to be found in the modern gym. The once productive, and sometimes enlarging, capacities of physical labour, including walking and cycling, are today simulated inside an air-conditioned chamber --achieving nothing and going nowhere. The British may comfort themselves that it is only in America where the decline of public walking has contributed to obesity levels among some sections of the population which, in extremis, threaten the very capacity for walking itself.

Yet when residents of Britain's first environment-friendly Millennium Village at Greenwich were recently asked whether they used the new underground station close by, most confessed that -- at ten minutes' walking distance -- it was considered too far. They had, no doubt, taken their cue from the Environment Minister at the time, who famously required a chauffeur-driven car to travel 200 yards. Both public and politicians in the post-Kyoto era would do well to reflect on the Latin dictum, solvitur ambulando, which claims that "many things are solved by walking".

Ken Worpole's most recent book is 'Here Comes the Sun' (Reaktion)