""Language is like a road,"" she writes ""it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read."" Agent: Bonnie Nadell.
The relationship between walking and thought and its expression in words is the underlying theme to which she repeatedly returns. Her book captures, in the ease and cadences of its prose, the rhythms of a good walk. This volume provides a history of walking, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking and between walking and culture. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas-or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since ""Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking."" Inevitably, as these words suggest, Solnit's focus isn't pedestrianism's past but its prognosis-the way in which the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from ""automobilization and suburbanization."" Familiar as that message sounds, Solnit delivers it without the usual ecological and ideological pieties. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. Walking, says Solnit (Savage Dreams A Book of Migrations), is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests.
Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers.
Description A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Rosesĭrawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking.
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