Wanderlust A History of Walking

by Solnit, Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9780670882090
• ISBN10: 0670882097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-10
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories -- of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores -- to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers.

The first general history of walking, Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever-more automobile-dependent and accelerated world. With delightful profiles of some of the most signi

Author Biography

Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
I. The Pace of Thoughts	1	(78)
Tracing a Headland: An Introduction	3	(11)
The Mind at Three Miles an Hour	14	(16)
Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism	30	(15)
The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages	45	(19)
Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic	64	(15)
II. From the Garden to the Wild	79	(90)
The Path Out of the Garden	81	(23)
The Legs of William Wordsworth	104	(14)
A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking	118	(15)
Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival	133	(15)
Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars	148	(21)
III. Lives of the Streets	169	(78)
The Solitary Stroller and the City	171	(25)
Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt	196	(18)
Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions	214	(18)
Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space	232	(15)
IV. Past the End of the Road	247	(46)
Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche	249	(18)
The Shape of a Walk	267	(10)
Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points	277	(16)
Notes	293	(26)
Index	319	(6)
Sources for Foot Quotations	325