She doesn’t pay attention to the roads, transportation companies, bridges, parks, promenades, broad walks, canals, and state authority that made her romantic walkers possible in large numbers. She fails to explore the range of means and tools the eighteenth century society used to transform the countryside into a garden. She omits German walkers and naturalists who account for a substantial amount of both select walking and travel literature. Solnit’s work contains significant omissions. She keenly elucidates the integral relationship between suburb and treadmill, points out those who walk for the sake of establishing senseless records, and comments on the contemporary mountain climber who drives his car three blocks to practice rock climbing in a three-story glass store front situated along a major inter-state highway. Her politics do not impair her insights into the circumscribed condition of walking in contemporary society.
British walkers confirming traditional walking rights across private lands, women striving to take back the night they never had, the Sierra Club protesting west coast logging, Chinese protesters at Tianamen Square in 1987, or people trying to institute a street festival, are all Solnit’s kind. Solnit’s undisguised allegiances are with all those who would liberate the countryside and the city. She frequently conceives of walking as an activity that, although being displaced from and even squeezed out of society, also constitutes an instrument for reclaiming the world. The second source of her book (not always in harmony with her first) is Solnit’s conscious romantic and democratic passion to defend the places people meet and assemble. Both its literal and metaphorical genesis (for the purpose of Solnit’s knowledge and economy of writing) was the eighteenth century English garden that stands for a tamed, controlled, and selected environment. It was largely an elite and idiosyncratic activity. Wanderlust has its first source in Solnit’s recognition that walking as a chosen activity, only recently stepped into the world. And it devotes a considerable number of pages to the condition of walking in the contemporary United States and Solnit’s favorite American cities, San Francisco and New York, whose walking centers have survived. It treats select intellectuals’ encounters with Paris. It reflects on walking in England and English literature (a well-studied subject). This book has for its center a handful of modem thinkers ranging from Rousseau and Longfellow, Baudelaire to Kierkegaard, and Walter Benjamin.
Rather, title notwithstanding, it is essentially a perceptive cultural commentary about what writers, thinkers, protesters, and Solnit herself have made of their walking in the last two centuries. This work is not quite a history of walking nor is it a study of Wanderlust.
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