2016 read #49: Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
293 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 11 to June 14
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Way back when I first began this blogging project / reading more project, one of the first books to make a powerful impression on me was Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. At the time, dazed by her elegant fluency and my emotional resonance, my sense of kinship, with her ruminations on life, love, and the American West, I marveled, "Solnit, more so than almost any other author whose words I've happened upon, speaks to me, articulating thoughts and feelings my fingers are too clumsy to share." I stand by that initial enthusiasm for Getting Lost, despite three subsequent years of books both wondrous and inane, but nowadays I might add the caution that it was Getting Lost as a work, as a statement I interpreted through my own filters of background and experience, rather than Solnit as an author, that spoke to me so meaningfully.

My to-read list is crowded with Solnit's other works and essay collections, yet it's taken me until now to read another. I wasn't avoiding her work, precisely; I attempted The Faraway Nearby but, at the time, found myself confounded by the literary density of what I faced. I opted for some disposable fantasy novel or other in its place, and just haven't gotten around to trying again. Perhaps there was some half-conscious pessimism involved, a suspicion that Getting Lost was an anomaly, an accidental congruence of outlook and identification, irreproducible, an island microenvironment isolated at the crest of a desert range.

Where do I begin with Wanderlust? It is a work of tremendous ambition and erudition, a marvelous display of traced connections and cogent inferences. The chapter on mountaineering alone nearly made Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind superfluous three years before its publication, sketching in much the same history with the addition of non-Western perspectives, such as the Japanese tradition of Shugendō, which Macfarlane (so far as I can recall) didn't even mention. But Solnit explores so much more than the cultural history -- from Wordsworth to Thoreau to Muir, from formal gardens to English gardens to walking clubs -- of Romantic nature-worship and Anglophone conceptualizations of the virtue of outdoor recreation. She swerves into compelling tangents on gender and sexuality, on cultural partitions of "acceptable" spaces, on histories of public assembly and revolution. Why is it that, despite all the histories I've read that have touched on the French Revolution, I didn't learn about the march of the market women on October 5, 1789, until I found it in a history of walking? Why is it, for that matter, that I never heard of the popular protests and demonstrations against the First Gulf War until now? With the Orlando massacre and the threatened ascendancy of reactionary fascists in the public sphere, the poignancy and eloquence of Solnit's passages on oppression and resistance sank deep into me.

As with any conceptual history of such breadth and ambition, there were inevitably some chapters that didn't interest me much, various passages of dry material between my particular highlights. Nonetheless, this book is a tremendous achievement and a compelling thesis on the vital importance of public spaces and civic pedestrianism. Despite the more recent social movements toward "walkable cities," Solnit's closing chapters on the automotive deserts of suburbia remain as direly insightful as they were sixteen years ago.