Wanderlust: A History of Walking

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Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 40

by Rebecca Solnit


  ref “According to this view”: Falk, “Brain Evolution,” 115.

  ref “these features led to ‘whole-body cooling’ ”: Falk, “Brain Evolution,” 128, and at length in Falk, Braindance. See also E. Wheeler, “The Influence of Bipedalism on the Energy and Water Budgets of Early Hominids,” Journal of Human Evolution 21 (1991): 117–36.

  ref I called up Owen Lovejoy: C. Owen Lovejoy, interview by author, June 23, 1998.

  4. THE UPHILL ROAD TO GRACE: Some Pilgrimages

  ref “These devout and simple people”: John Noel, The Story of Everest (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1927), 108.

  ref Much of the information on Chimayó comes from Elizabeth Kay, Chimayó Valley Traditions (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987), and Don J. Usner, Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995).

  ref “All sites of pilgrimage”: Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 41.

  ref “Often as she listened to the pilgrims’ tales”: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet Classics, 1965), bk. 2, pt. 3, ch. 26, 589.

  ref “When pilgrims begin to walk”: Nancy Louise Frey, Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 72.

  ref “Liminars are stripped of status and authority”: Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 37.

  ref “Wherever you go, there you are”: First said by Carl Franz, in his People’s Guide to Mexico, Greg says.

  ref “To remain a wanderer”: Introduction, Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (Santa Fe: Ocean Tree Books, 1991), xiii.

  ref “a complete willingness”: Ibid., 7.

  ref “it doesn’t show dirt”: Ibid., 56.

  ref “a comb, a folding toothbrush”: Ibid., xiii.

  ref “I walk until given shelter”: Ibid., 25.

  ref “Reverend Charles Billups and other Birmingham ministers”: Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 236.

  ref March of Dimes: Information from telephone conversation with Tony Choppa, April 1998.

  ref “At the end of November, 1974”: Werner Herzog, On Walking in Ice (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 3.

  ref “While I was taking a shit”: Ibid., 27.

  ref “For one splendid fleeting moment”: Ibid., 57.

  5. LABYRINTHS AND CADILLACS: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic

  ref W. H. Matthews cautions: W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (1922; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), 66, 69.

  ref “Labyrinths . . . are usually in the form of a circle”: Lauren Artress, handout at Grace Cathedral, n.d.

  ref “each of the speaking characters”: Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, 117.

  ref “A garden path”: Charles W. Moore, William J. Matchell, and William Turnbull, The Poetics of Gardens (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 35.

  ref “I have a little game”: John Finlay, ed., The Pleasures of Walking (1934; reprint, New York: Vanguard Press, 1976), 8.

  ref “in a kind of out-of-body form”: Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1996), 4.

  ref “general principles of the mnemonic”: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992), 18.

  6. THE PATH OUT OF THE GARDEN

  ref These descriptions of Dorothy Wordsworth occur on pages 132 and 188 of Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970).

  ref “Twas a keen frosty morning”: William Wordsworth, letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, December 24, 1799, in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 273–80. It’s worth noting that in this letter Wordsworth refers both to “Taylor’s tour,” a written account that described the first waterfall they visited, and to the waterfall itself as “a performance as you might expect from some giant gardiner employed by one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, if this same giant gardiner had consulted with Spenser,” which is to say that his vision was framed in the literary and gardening traditions of England.

  ref Wordsworth and his companions are said to have made walking into something new: See, for example, Marion Shoard, This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, 2d. ed. (London: Gaia Books, 1997), 79: “It is to Wordsworth as much as anyone that we also owe the idea that the proper way of communing with nature is by walking through the countryside.”

  ref “I have always fancied”: Christopher Morley, “The Art of Walking” (1917), in Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode, The Magic of Walking (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), a cheery evangelistic volume advocating walking for health, providing practical tips, and including an anthology of essays on the subject.

  ref use as their demonstration case Carl Moritz: “Yet within less than ten years from the date of Moritz’s tour a striking change had taken place, and the fashion of the walking-tour (or pedestrian-tour, as it was then called) had come in. It was the beginning of a movement . . .” (Morris Marples, Shank’s Pony: A Study of Walking [London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1959], 31); “to the new phenomenon of the pedestrian tour, and to other less ambitious forms of walking for pleasure . . . established, in the last ten to fifteen years of the eighteenth century” (Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel [Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1997], 4); “removing walking’s long-standing implication of necessity and so of poverty and vagrancy” (Anne Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 10); “changes in the practice of and attitudes toward travel in general, and walking in particular, which accompany the transport revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century” (ibid., 18). They all assert walking is travel; that it is not necessarily so is my argument.

  ref “A traveller on foot”: Carl Moritz, Travels of Carl Philipp Moritz in England in 1782: A Reprint of the English Translation of 1795, with an introduction by E. Matheson (1795; reprint, London: Humphrey Milford, 1924), 37.

  ref “I walked with my brother at my side”: Dorothy Wordsworth, quoted in Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth: A Biography (New York: Antheneum, 1980), 70.

  ref “I cannot pass unnoticed”: Dorothy Wordsworth to her proud aunt Crackanthorp, April 21, 1794, cited in de Selincourt, Letters, 117.

  ref “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods”: Thoreau, “Walking,” 98–99.

  ref The eighteenth century created a taste for nature: See Christopher Thacker, The Wildness Pleases: The Origins of Romanticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 1–2. He writes, “Aristotle claimed that all poetry was ‘the imitation of men in action.’ By poetry, he implied all forms of art, from sculpture to drama, from epic poetry to history, to painting and even to music. . . . Aristotle’s definition of the scope of poetry cuts out many matters which we might consider wholly proper, indeed desirable, as the subject of a work of art. Above all, the depiction of ‘nature’ is a subject which we, living two centuries after the romantic explosion at the end of the eighteenth century, have come to accept almost without thinking.” Naming many landscape paintings, Thacker goes on to say that such subject matter would have seemed incomprehensible, or at least inconsequential, to Aristotle and indeed to any educated onlooker before the transformation of perception that “took place in western Europe in the eighteenth century.”

  ref “Sixteenth-century doctors stressed”: Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 100.

  ref Queen Elizabeth added a raised terrace: Susan Lasdun, The English Park: Royal, Private & Public (New York: Vendome Press, 1992), 35.

  ref “There is gravel walks and grass and close walks”: Celia Fiennes on t
he gardens at Agnes Burton, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 90–91.

  ref “These avenues provided the shade and shelter for walks”: Lasdun, English Park, 66.

  ref “O glorious Nature!”: Shaftesbury in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620–1840 (New York: Harper, 1975), 122; also a key text in Thacker, The Wildness Pleases, whose title comes from this effusion.

  ref “Poetry, Painting, and Gardening”: Walpole, quoted in Hunt and Willis, Genius of the Place, 11.

  ref “asked to be explored”: John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143.

  ref “Whereas the French formal garden was based on a single axial view”: Carolyn Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 12.

  ref “into harmony with the age’s humanism”: Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes, 1700–1750 (London: Country Life, 1967), 101.

  ref “Within thirty years”: Stowe Landscape Gardens (Great Britain: National Trust, 1997), 45.

  ref “O lead me to the wide-extended walks”: James Thomson, The Seasons (Edinburgh and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1860), 139. Kenneth Johnston, in The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998), calls The Seasons the most successful poem of the century, and Andrew Wilton in Turner and the Sublime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) documents its impact.

  ref “Everyone takes a different way”: Pope, letter of 1739, cited in Stowe Landscape Gardens, 66.

  ref “or drove about it in cabriolets”: Walpole, letter to George Montagu, July 7, 1770, in Selected Letters of Horace Walpole (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1926), 93.

  ref “Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art”: Sir Joshua Reynolds, quoted in Hunt and Willis, Genius of the Place, 32.

  ref “leapt the fence”: Walpole, quoted in Hunt and Willis, Genius of the Place, 13.

  ref “Within the last sixty years”: Wordsworth, Guide to the Lakes, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 69.

  ref “greatly compensates for the mediocrity of this park”: Travels of Carl Philipp Moritz, 44.

  ref “The People of London are as fond of walking”: Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, vol. 2 of the Collected Works, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 293.

  ref “how to admire an old twisted tree”: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (New York: Washington Square Press, 1961), 80.

  ref “there is a sense in which”: John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 4–5.

  ref “It is very true”: Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 83–84.

  ref “Were it not for this general deficiency of objects”: William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, particularly the Highlands of Scotland, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1776 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 2:119.

  ref “Let us learn, in real scenes, to trace”: Richard Payne Knight, “The Landscape: A Didactic Poem,” in The Genius of the Place, 344.

  ref “Thomas Gray’s celebrated Lake District tour”: Gray wrote about it in his “Journal in the Lakes,” in The Works of Thomas Gray in Prose and Verse, vol. 1, ed. Edmund Gosse (New York: Macmillan, 1902).

  ref “They were country ladies”: Dorothy Wordsworth, Oct. 16, 1792, in de Selincourt, Letters, 84.

  ref “That she should have walked three miles”: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Avenal Books, 1985), 30; “At that moment they were met,” 49; “Her figure was elegant,” 52; “Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness,” 340; “favourite walk,” 164; “More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble,” 176; “had never seen a place for which nature had done more,” 234; “rapturously cried, ‘what delight! what felicity!,” 150; “it is not the object of this work,” 232; “ ‘My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?,’ ” 360.

  ref “In the morning, I read Mr Knight’s Landscape”: July 27, 1800, reprinted in Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Colette Clark (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1978), 53–54.

  7. THE LEGS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  ref “His legs were pointedly condemned”: Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 53–54.

  ref “Happy in this, that I with nature walked”: William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1995), 322. All quotes are from the 1805 version.

  ref “He sees nothing but himself and the universe”: Hazlitt, “The Lake School,” in William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 218.

  ref “more glorious than I had ever beheld”: Wordsworth, Prelude, 158.

  ref “Should the guide I choose”: Ibid., 36.

  ref “With this act of disobedience”: Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 188.

  ref “standing on top of golden hours”: Wordsworth, Prelude, 226.

  ref “each spot of old and recent fame”: Ibid., 348.

  ref “Oswald had traveled to India”: Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 286.

  ref “no region, pervious to human feet”: Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart—Edward Irving—William Wordsworth,” in Literary Reminiscences, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1880), 597.

  ref “I have some thoughts:” in de Selincourt, Letters, 153; and “So like a peasant,” Wordsworth, Prelude, 42.

  ref “Throughout that turbulent time”: Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 205.

  ref “that odious class of men called democrats”: Wordsworth, letter to a friend, May 23, 1794, in de Selincourt, Letters, 119.

  ref “The principal object, then, proposed in these poems”: Wordsworth, preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, in Anthology of Romanticism, ed. Ernest Bernbaum (New York: Ronald Press, 1948), 300–301.

  ref “I love a public road”: Wordsworth, Prelude, 496.

  ref “Had I been born in a class”: Johnston, Hidden Wordsworth, 57.

  ref “They were surrounded”: Hazlitt, “The Lake School,” 217.

  ref “He won’t a man as said a deal to common fwoak”: Local quoted in Wordsworth Among the Peasantry of Westmorland, cited in Davies, Wordsworth, 322.

  ref “He would set his head a bit forrad”: Andrew J. Bennett, “ ‘Devious Feet’: Wordsworth and the Scandal of Narrative Form,” LELH 59 (1992): 147.

  ref “At present he is walking”: Dorothy, in a letter to Lady Beaumont, May 1804, in Davies, Wordsworth, 166.

  ref “almost physiological relation” and following: Seamus Heaney, “The Makings of a Music,” in Preoccupations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 66, 68.

  ref “the lord who owned the ground”: Davies, Wordsworth, 324. See also Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture, 117.

  ref “The grave old bard”: Letter published in the Manchester Guardian, October 7, 1887, cited in Howard Hill, Freedom to Roam: The Struggle for Access to Britain’s Moors and Mountains (Ashbourne, England: Moorland Publishing, 1980), 40. The presence of a deferential “Mr. Justice Coleridge” on the walk and Sir John Wallace at the confrontation make it appear that this is another version of the same event. Late in life Wordsworth, alas, also opposed the building of a railroad that would take tourists to Windermere, crustily remarking that workers could take their holidays closer to home. Though an unkind remark, it is not altogether wrong about the impact of tourism—a century later the Sierra Club would take the phrase “render accessible”
out of its mission statement, realizing that people could love the landscape to death with tourism infrastructures and general trampling.

  ref “I purpose within a month”: Earle Vonard Weller, ed., Autobiography of John Keats, Compiled from his Letters and Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1933), 105.

  ref “I should not have consented”: Keats, in Marples, Shank’s Pony, 68.

  ref “hunger-bitten girl”: Wordsworth, Prelude, 374.

  8. A THOUSAND MILES OF CONVENTIONAL SENTIMENT: The Literature of Walking

  ref “a processional march”: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 10.

  ref “In the neighborhood of latitude”: Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” in Collected Essays (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), 1.

  ref “One of the pleasantest things in the world”: William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey,” in The Lore of the Wanderer, ed. Geoffrey Goodchild (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 65.

  ref “The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread”: Leslie Stephen, “In Praise of Walking,” in Finlay, Pleasures of Walking, 20.

  ref “lameness was too severe”: Stephen, “In Praise,” 24.

  ref “A walking tour should be gone on alone”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “Walking Tours,” in Goodchild, Lore of the Wanderer, 10–11.

  ref “I have two doctors”: G. M. Trevelyan, “Walking,” in Finlay, Pleasures of Walking, 57.

  ref “Whenever I was with friends”: Max Beerbohm, “Going Out on a Walk,” in Finlay, Pleasures of Walking, 39.

  ref “I wish to speak a word for Nature” and following: Thoreau, “Walking,” 93–98.

  ref “The best thing is to walk”: Bruce Chatwin, “It’s a Nomad Nomad World,” in Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969–1989 (New York: Viking, 1996), 103.

 

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