This book is really smart and satisfying; it’s an excellent blend of the personal and the historical and the philosophical. Early in the book, Solnit talks about walking’s place—or lack thereof—in our daily lives: walking as part of “the time inbetween,” “the time of walking to or from a place” as “uncluttered time,” appreciated by those who understand “the uses of the useless” (xiii). “Each walk,” Solnit writes, “moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience—so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do” (xv). And: “many people today live in a series of interiors—home, car, gym, office, shops—disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it” (9). At the end of the book she returns to walking/not walking, telling the story of the rise of suburbia and the automobile, and also telling the story of walking through Las Vegas, a pedestrian-unfriendly place that nevertheless is full of walkers.
In between, she explores different histories of walking and kinds of walking and walkers. She writes that certain kinds of thinking and writing that are tied to walking: in the book’s second chapter, she talks about Rousseau and Kierkegaard, how their work “is often descriptive, evocative, personal,” and how “it has room for delight and personality” and the specifics of experience, things seen and heard (26). There is a close-reading of walking and its meanings and uses in Pride and Prejudice, and lots about Wordsworth and the Romantic project of learning to see landscape, and to appreciate it, and some about city-walking and Walter Benjaman and the idea of the flâneur, and a whole excellent chapter on “walking art” from the 1960s and later, artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.
I like it when Solnit writes about her own walks, and walking’s serendipity: how when she walks she may find “friends passing by, a sought-for book in a store window, compliments and greetings from my loquacious neighbors, architectural delights, posters for music and ironic political commentary on walls and telephone poles, fortune-tellers, the moon coming up between buildings, glimpses of other lives and other homes, and street trees noisy with songbirds (11). She continues: “The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don’t know you’re looking for, and you don’t know a place until it surprises you” (ibid.). On walking in San Francisco after having lived in rural New Mexico, she writes about the fullness of the city and all its possibilities: “Every building, every storefront, seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of possibilities made all the richer by the conjunctions […] Zen centers, Pentecostal churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, burrito places, movie palaces, dim sum shops” (171).
There’s a chapter on pilgrimage, the story of a walking pilgrimage Solnit made in New Mexico interspersed with ideas about pilgrimages generally, or Christian pilgrimages generally: the pilgrimage as a “liminal state” where normal hierarchies can disappear (51). (Also pleasing is the story of Peace Pilgrim in this chapter: I’d heard about her before, I think from some Quakers who met in Earl Hall on Columbia’s campus, but reading about her again was interesting, and made me want to read her whole story.)
I was more interested in the bits of this book that focused on personal history and European cultural/intellectual history than the anthropological/evolutionary history bits, but even those were lucid and readable.
Leave a Reply