Wanderlust

by Solnit, Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9781859846230
• ISBN10: 1859846238
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: Verso Books

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 profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction - from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja - Wanderlust offers a provocative examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.

Table of Contents

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