Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in his Confessions, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. The history of walking goes back further than the history of human beings, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act rather than a means to an end is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning. That history began with the walks of various characters in the eighteenth century, but the more literary among them strove to consecrate walking by tracing it to Greece, whose practices were so happily revered and misrepresented then. The eccentric English revolutionary and writer John Thelwall wrote a massive, turgid book, The Peripatetic, uniting Rousseauian romanticism with this spurious classical tradition. IN one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages: I pursue my meditations on foot, he remarked. And after Thelwall's book appeared in 1793, many more would make the claim until it became an established idea that the ancients walked to think, so much so that the very picture seems part of cultural history: austerely draped men speaking gravely as they pace through a dry Mediterranean landscape punctuated with the occasional marble column. 

Solnit spends a few of her words on this subject, but misses so many opportunities to dwell in walking like a true history of walking could. She commits the boring sin of so many subject historians, turning her history into a chronicle of famous people who have talked about walking. The subject of walking presents such a large untilled field, yet Solnit only manages to raise a crop of sickly alfalfa. But her thoughts on walking did inspire a few interesting moments for me.  


Have you ever marveled at the balance of a human being walking? They flow smoothly forward like liquid poured and yet beneath the flow is disguised a drip drop foot placement, defying gravity. The walker does not carry his weight on feet so much as in movement. In momentum, which is the magic word, abracadabra of the walker. Like sliding, like sleighing, like drifting and flowing, walking is the only movement I have seen that looks like a wheel without a wheel. Walkers should be rollers, but the mechanics are nothing like rolling, the mechanics are tottering. It's a marvel to me that two jointed limbs can produce such a gliding movement.