i first picked up rebecca solnit’s book: a field guide to getting lost when i was wandering around in portland, oregon. it was a suitable companion on my virgin couchsurfing trip, in a city that’s known for its wandering and wanderers.
it has taken a while for me to explore more of her work, which i’ll blame on inertia. wanderlust is essentially a history of walking, a book that weaves together different aspects and interpretations of walking from the arts, social commentary, gender studies, history and civil movements.
it’s a dense volume, one that has taken me a month to plough through, and through the barrage of facts that solnit shares in the book, what remains are beautiful turns of phrases and platforms of thought to leap off from.
here are a few choice sections:
- walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. it leaves us free to think without being wholy lost in our thoughts…the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. this creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.
- pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and te material in its emphasis on the story and its setting, though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in terms of the most material details- of where the buddha was born or where christ died, where the relics are or the holy water flows. or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrmage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul…pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of ones body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. we are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the journey.
- cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunciton, qualities best basked in by walking. a city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination…this was the daytime marvel of cities for me: coincidences, the mingling of many kinds of people, poetry given away to strangers under the open sky…rural walking has found a moral imperative in the love of nature…urban walking has always been a shadier business, easily turning into soliciting, cruising, promenading…
- there is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude– a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. in the country one’s solitude is geogrphical– one is altogether outside society, so solitude has a sensible geographical explanation, and then there is a kind of communion with the non human. in the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one’s secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries…in small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.
- the original treadmill was a large wheel…that several prisoners trod for set periods. it was meant to rationalise prisoners’ psyches…and break down the obstinate spirit. the body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have, instead the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. thus, the body, a recreational, rather than utilitarian entity, doesn’t work, but works out.
