wanderlust

always begin the year with Solnit

Walking may seem like a simple activity, but thankfully we have Rebecca Solnit to explain the history of putting one foot in front of the other.

My Great Lake

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust isn’t as much about nature as I would think it would be, given that my daily exercise is walking up and down a driveway in a pine forest and my most memorable walks have been through countryside—Upstate New York, the Lake District, Galilee.

Walking, it turns out, is more about the history of the city. The history of human interaction, and the history of industrialization. Walking turns out to be a lot about humanity’s evolution beyond walking.

“A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man or an out-of-the-way being who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him,” said Carl Moritz in 1782. The German through-hiking through England at the end of the eighteenth century found that innkeepers scorned him and coachmen assumed he needed a lift.

It reminded me of times I have been walking in places where humans are not supposed to be walking: on freeways, on country highways, walking out of the Barcelona airport into the city center, and the sort of desperation you know you must look to others, being a walker in an infrastructure built for two-ton metal death machines.

Although I certainly know the discomfort Mortiz describes, I thought of how much more often we have been offered rides, given pointers to free showers or couches, or offered hospitality, even in askance.

Walking, it turns out, isn’t so much about humans outside in nature as it is about humans in their built environment. Walking uncovers how humans encounter themselves as creatures and as selves in the Industrial Age of mechanization.

Walking is reading, writes Rebecca Solnit, provocatively.

An activity of a sort of embodied literary practice—to read, to write, to think is to move in our mind as we move in our feet. Walking is a public activity and thus a fertile field for interpretation. In walking, we either expose ourselves to other people or we have a chance to stare at the lives of others—we walk to see and be seen—and that’s a pretty malleable activity that can be bent to all sorts of purposes.

The difference between revolutions and festivals becomes even less distinct, for in a world of dreary isolation festivals are inherently revolutionary, Solnit writes, and I can’t help but think of all the marches I have walked with in Manhattan.

In those moments of moving through the streets with people who share one's beliefs comes the rare, magical possibility of a kind of populist communion — perhaps some find it in churches armies and sports teams… At such times it is as though the still small pool of one's own identity has been overrun by a great flood bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments

I wonder now if anyone is ever protesting or paraded simply because such occasions provide the only time with American city streets are a perfect place to be a pedestrian safe from assault by cars and strangers if not occasionally police. From the middle of the street, the sky is wider and the shop windows are opaque

I remember observing that I could see more of the city than the goods on sale when I began cycling in New York City during the COVID-19 lockdown. Without cars or 53-foot tractor-trailers, I felt confident enough to venture into the middle of the street. And, as Solnit says, I discovered second stories of buildings I never noticed before, that I walked by every day. I discovered myself as a citizen of the city and a member of a neighborhood rather than the identity of the consumer held out to us on the sidewalk.

Paris is a great city of Walkers and it is the great city of revolution those two facts are often written about as though they are unrelated but they are vitally linked

That is to say, the French are people for whom the parade is an army if it marches like one.

The French, Solnit claims, are walkers and revolutionaries because their imaginations dwell in public: they are engaged with public issues and public dreams. How many of us are engrossed in our own private dreams in our own private Land Rovers?

When you are on the subway, you all listen to the same busker. And you smile to the tune of the same song.

Solnit further notes that, in leaving behind our feet as the primary mode of transportation, our bodies are no longer utilitarian but rather sites of recreation. We have left them unemployed from the main task our bipedal pounds of flesh have been so excellently designed for over the past 10,000 years: moving us about. So now, we have to give them other tasks to keep them occupied.

Because our bodies are now unemployed, our expectations for walking change. People are only willing to walk about a quarter mile now, Solnit says, that is a distance that can be walked in five minutes. Suburbanization and the automobile have shrunk the distance that people can walk and now will walk—Solnit says—even in cities. The suburbs have infected the way that we approach our cities.

I think of how the city changed this for me: 20 blocks was a mile, and I knew I could walk that in 20 minutes, and because it was a known quantity, and cheaper and often more reliable than the train for a short distance, I opted for the walk.

When I began cycling, that changed. Cycling is an activity that Solnit is always nudging up against in this book, but she masterfully refrains from straying off her unbeaten walking path. Once I had access to a bike, a private mode of transportation that wasn’t my feet, the way I accessed and moved around the city changed yet again. It wasn’t quite like having a car, but it wasn’t quite like walking.

The internet is full of stories of walking. Because walking seems to hold the promise of transformation within the twin premises of transportation and stability. Without going anywhere, really, you will find that you have moved forward into a completely new life.

We’ve come up with many new ways of propelling ourselves through space, but perhaps no better metaphor for what it means to be alive than going on a walk.

P.S. Nicole Winfield’s reporting on the unholy killing of Kenneth Eugene Smith at the hands of the state is a lone voice of reason in a sea of silence that so often surrounds the death of the poor.