Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part III

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part IV

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Notes

  Index

  Sources for Foot Quotations

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group,

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  Copyright © Rebbeca Solnit, 2000

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted works:

  Selections fromCold Mountain: 100 Poems by Han-Shan, translated by Burton Watson. Copyright © 1970 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

  “On Climbing the Sierra Matterhorn Again After Thirty-One Years” from No Nature by Gary Synder. Copyright © 1992 by Gary Synder. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Selections from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville–Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  Page iii: Detail of postcard, ca. 1900, showing passerby in front of Notre Dame de Paris.

  1: Linda Conner, Maze, Chartres, Cathedral, France, 1983. Courtesy of the artist.

  79: Cedric White, Sierra Club Mountaineers on Mont Resplendent in the Canadian Rockies, 1928. Courtesy William Colby Library, Sierra Club.

  169: March of the Mothers in the Plaza de Mayo, April 1978. Courtesy of the Associacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires.

  247: Marina Abramovic, from The Lovers, 1988, black and white photograph. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

  Solnit, Rebecca.

  Wanderlust: a history of walking / Rebecca Solnit

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-1011-9955-8

  Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  First edition (electronic): March 2002

  Acknowledgments

  I owe the origins of this book to friends who pointed out to me that I was writing about walking in the course of writing about other things and should do so more expansively—notably Bruce Ferguson, who commissioned me to write about walking for the catalog accompanying his 1996 show Walking and Thinking and Walking at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; editor William Murphy, who read the results and told me I should think about a book on walking; and Lucy Lippard, who, while we were on a trespassing stroll near her home, clinched the idea for the book for me by exclaiming, “I wish I had time to write it but I don’t, so you should” (though I have written a very different book than Lucy would). One of the great pleasures of writing about this subject was that, instead of a few great experts, walking has a multitude of amateurs—everyone walks, a surprising number of people think about walking, and its history is spread across many scholars’ fields—so that nearly everyone I know contributed an anecdote, a reference, or a perspective to my researches. The history of walking is everyone’s history, but my version of it particularly benefited from the following friends, who have my heartfelt gratitude: Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker, who supplied fine ideas and much encouragement early on; my brother David, for luring me long ago into street marches and the pilgrimage-protests at the Nevada Test Site; my bicycle-activist brother Stephen; John and Tim O’Toole, Maya Gallus, Linda Connor, Jane Handel, Meridel Rubenstein, Jerry West, Greg Powell, Malin Wilson-Powell, David Hayes, Harmony Hammond, May Stevens, Edie Katz, Tom Joyce, and Thomas Evans; Jessica, Gavin, and Daisy in Dunkeld; Eck Finlay in Edinburgh and his father in Little Sparta; Valerie and Michael Cohen in June Lake; Scott Slovic in Reno; Carolyn from Reclaim the Streets in Brixton; Iain Boal; my agent Bonnie Nadell; my editor Paul Slovak at Viking Penguin, who took to the idea of a general history of walking immediately and made this one possible; and particularly Pat Dennis, who listened to me chapter by chapter, related much on mountaineering history and Asian mysticism to me, and walked alongside me for the duration of this book.

  Part I

  THE PACE OF THOUGHTS

  * * *

  * * *

  Isn’t it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking . . . questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.—HONORÉ DE BALZAC, THEORIE DE LA DEMARCHÉ

  * * *

  An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.—LUCY LIPPARD, OVERLAY

  * * *

  We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of place must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.—GARY SNYDER, “BLUE MOUNTAINS CONSTANTLY WALKING”

  * * *

  Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary rush.—VIRGINIA WOOLF, MOMENTS OF BEING

  * * *

  In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, “OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS”

  * * *

  As a result of walking tours in Scotland while he was an undergraduate, he recalls in his autobiography, Pilgrim’s Way (1940), that “the works of Aristotle are forever bound up with me with the smell of peat and certain stretches of granite and heather.”—ON JOHN BUCHAN, FIRST BARON TWEEDSMUIR, INCHALLENGE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE LITERATURE OF MOUNTAINEERING

  * * *

  . . . while he himself began to walk around at a lively pace in a “Keplerian ellipse,” all the time explaining in a low voice his thoughts on “complementarity.” He walked with bent head and knit brows: from time to time, he looked up at me and underlined some important point by a sober gesture. As he spoke, the words and sentences which I had read before in his papers suddenly took life and became loaded with meaning. It was one of the few solemn moments that count in an existence, the revelation of a world of dazzling thought.—LEON ROSENFELD, ON A 1929 ENCOUNTER WITH NIELS BOHR

  * * *

  Last Sunday I took a Walk toward highgate and in the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr. Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s in conversatio
n with Coleridge—I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable—I walked with him at his alderman-after-dinner pace for nearly two miles I suppose. In those two Miles he broached a thousand things—let me see if I can give you a list—Nightingales, poetry—on Poetical Sensation—Metaphysics—Different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition—so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness—Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—Southey believes in them—Southey’s belief too much diluted—A Ghost story—. . . .—JOHN KEATS, IN A LETTER TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA KEATS

  * * *

  Sir, I have received your new book written against the human race, and I thank you. . . . Never was so much intelligence used to make us stupid. While reading it, one longs to go on all fours.—VOLTAIRE TO ROUSSEAU, ON THE DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY

  * * *

  The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait; this made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provided feelings of shame in him.—FREUD, CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  * * *

  Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by helding holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.—SAMUEL BECKETT

  * * *

  John and the Austrian walked one way along the shore discussing the formation of sand banks and the theories of the tides, and Charlotte & I went in the opposite direction for above two hours and lastly lay down among the long grass and gathered shells until our Handkerchiefs were quite full.—EFFIE GRAY RUSKIN

  * * *

  You’ve got to walk / that lonesome valley / Walk it yourself / You’ve gotta gotta go / By yourself / Ain’t nobody else / gonna go there for you / Yea, you’ve gotta go there by yourself.—TRADITIONAL GOSPEL SONG

  * * *

  But if a man walketh in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.—JOHN 11:10

  * * *

  But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem me, and be merciful unto me. My foot standeth in an even place.—PSALMS 26:1–12

  * * *

  The farther pilgrims move from their common world, the closer they come to the realm of the divine. We might mention that in Japanese the word for “walk” is the same word which is used to refer to Buddhist practice; the practitioner (gyōja) is then also the walker, one who does not reside anywhere, who abides in emptiness. All of this is of course related to the notion of Buddhism as a path: practice is a concrete approach to Buddhahood.—ALLAN G. GRAPARD, “FLYING MOUNTAINS AND WALKERS OF EMPTINESS: TOWARD A DEFINITION OF SACRED SPACE IN JAPANESE RELIGIONS”

  * * *

  At the same time continue to count inhalations and exhalations as you walk slowly around the room. Begin walking with the left foot and walk in such a way that the foot sinks into the floor, first the heel and then the toes. Walk calmly and steadily, with poise and dignity. The walking must not be done absentmindedly, and the mind must be taut as you concentrate on the counting.—INSTRUCTIONS ON WALKING MEDITATION IN THREE PILLARS OF ZEN

  * * *

  Sigmund Freud believed, for example, that the psychical foundation of all travel was the first separation and the various other departures from one’s mother, including the final journey into death. Journeying is therefore an activity related to a larger feminine realm, so that it is not surprising that Freud himself was ambivalent about it. Of the landscape he said, “All of these dark woods, narrow defiles, high grounds and deep penetrations are unconscious sexual imagery, and we are exploring a woman’s body.”—PAUL SHEPARD, NATURE AND MADNESS

  * * *

  The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.—THOMAS MERTON

  * * *

  I was the first in six generations to leave the Valley, the only one in my family to ever leave home. But I didn’t leave all the parts of me: I kept the ground of my own being. On it I walked away, taking with me the land, the Valley, Texas.—GLORIA ANZALDUA

  * * *

  An active line on a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake.—PAUL KLEE, ALLEGORIZING DRAWING

  * * *

  Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves (stumbling against words as against cobblestones)—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “LE SOLEIL”

  * * *

  At the other extreme is a group of figurative monuments in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, which try to draw the viewer back into the tumult of the past. Several works designed by James Drake along a path named Freedom Walk commemorate the brutal police repression of the famous marches in the spring of 1963. In one work, the walkway passes between two vertical slabs, from which bronze attack dogs emerge on either side and lunge into the pedestrian’s space. In another the walkway leads through an opening in a metal wall faced by two water cannons; just off the wall, by the walk, are two bronze figures of African Americans, a man crumpled to the ground and a woman standing with her back against the imagined force of the water. Integrated into the pedestrian experience of the park, these monuments invite everyone—black or white, young or old—to step for a moment into someone else’s shoes.—KIRK SAVAGE

  * * *

  I stride along with calm, with eyes, with shoes, / with fury, with forgetfulness—PABLO NERUDA

  Chapter 1

  TRACING A HEADLAND:

  An Introduction

  Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

  The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone’s adventures. The bodily history of walking is that of bipedal evolution and human anatomy. Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic. Here this history begins to become part of the history of the imagination and the culture, of what kind of pleasure, freedom, and meaning are pursued at different times by different kinds of walks and walkers. That imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet. Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics. The landscapes, urban and rural, gestate the stories, and the stories bring us ba
ck to the sites of this history.

  This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines. And though the history of walking is, as part of all these fields and everyone’s experience, virtually infinite, this history of walking I am writing can only be partial, an idiosyncratic path traced through them by one walker, with much doubling back and looking around. In what follows, I have tried to trace the paths that brought most of us in my country, the United States, into the present moment, a history compounded largely of European sources, inflected and subverted by the vastly different scale of American space, the centuries of adaptation and mutation here, and by the other traditions that have recently met up with those paths, notably Asian traditions. The history of walking is everyone’s history, and any written version can only hope to indicate some of the more well-trodden paths in the author’s vicinity—which is to say, the paths I trace are not the only paths.