Notes from Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit

There are powerful excerpts from Solnit's book on walking. I read her book this earlier this summer, and was transfixed by her thinking. Now, returning to those passages that I marked as I read, I realize the depth of her thinking and the epigrammatic power in her voice.


"I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles per hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness." (10)

"The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you. Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against the erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protrect the ineffable." (11)

"Much of the terminology of location and mobility -- words like nomad, decentered, marginalized, deterritorialized, border, migrant, and exile -- are not attached to specific places and people; they represent ideas of rootlessness and flux that seem as much the result of the ungrounded theory as its putative subject." (28)

"Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable..." (29)

"...the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire; walking sticks, shoes, maps canteens and backpacks are further material results of that desire....of engagement of the body and the mind and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world." (29)

"Walking came from Africa, from evolution, and from necessity, and it went everywhere, usually looking for something. The pilgrimage is one of the basic modes of walking; walking in search of something intangible...." (45)

"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 the material and its emphasis on the story and its setting ..." (50)

"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. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the body and the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. In pilgrimage, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her own and in this way too becomes part of the religion made up of stories of travel and transformation." (50)

"The collective walk brings together trhe iconography of the pilgrimage with that of the military march and the labor strike and demonstration: it is a show of strength as well as conviction, and an appeal to the temporal rather than spiritual powers -- or perhaps, in the case of civil rights movement, both." (58)

"A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts." (68)

"If journeying and walking are central metaphors, then all journeys, all walks, let us enter the same symbolic space as mazes and rituals do, if not so compellingly." (74)

Narrative as a sequence of related events---think of a sequence of images, or a sequence that unfolds as one moves in space, in time, while walking...

"For Wordsworth, walking was a mode not of traveling, but of being." (104)

tramp

vagabond

gypsy

nomad

"Walking is usually about something else -- about the walker's character or encounters, about nature or about achievement, so much so it ceases to be about walking." (112)

Walking is classless

"Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land." (162)

HS380: "The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life." (176)

About DeCerteau: "Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked, he wrote. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language. of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go, 'since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.'" (213)

"Walking becomes testifying." (216)

HS380: "Walking, which can be prayer, sex, communion with the land, or musing, becomes speech in these demonstrations and uprisings, and a lot of history has been written with the feet of citizens walking through their cities. Such walking is a bodily demonstration of political or cultural conviction, and one of the most universally available forms of public expression." (217)

common ground

"...walking as a cultural activity, as a pleasure, as travel, as a way of getting around, is fading, and with it goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination." (230)

"Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read." (268)

"To satisfy curiosity you must be willing to seem naive, to engage, to explore, to stare and be stared at, and people nowadays seem more willing or able to enter that state elsewhere than at home." (281)