Rebecca Solnit a City Is a Book We Read by Wandering
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A personal and brainy survey of three centuries of walking
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 14 years ago
Solnit's "history of walking" is a surprising excursion in a vast and unsystematised subject field area. Indeed, similar eating and playing, walking is one of these allegorical human activities that are invested with wildly different cultural meanings. I picked up the volume because I am an avid walker and mountaineer and, as I learned, an adherent to the British walking tour ethos. For me there is something fundamentally cleansing, wholesome and right about spending time in the great outdoors. However, this smug romanticism, this adhering to an "established organized religion for the middle grade" is sternly criticised past the writer of this book. For Solnit walking is a quintessentially political activity. And the politics play out at different levels. First, walking is a bulwark against the erosion of the listen by the ceaseless contemporary rethoric of efficiency and functionality. The walker exposes herself to the adventitious, the unexpected, the random and unscreened, and by doing and so rebels against the speed and alienation endemic in our postindustrial earth. Second, walking is also a reclamation of a physical and public space that is increasingly suburbanised and privatised. Solnit discusses how the early on 20th century metropolis was an arena for aesthetic experimentation and political agitation. Walkers and flaneurs, starting with De Quincey in London and Baudelaire in Paris, experimented with an urban underground culture suffused with eroticism and desire. Protest marchers all over the world and throughout the ages have relied on the democratic functions of the street to make their voices heard. Today, the scope for these kinds of trespasses are increasingly rare due to encroaching private property rights and a soulless, panoptic urban architecture. Hence, thus Solnit, we need to revitalise a counterculture to walk in resistance to the post-industrial and post-modern loss of space, fourth dimension and apotheosis. Last and perhaps not least, walking is and volition remain the domain of the apprentice. Information technology is one of these few areas of man activity where a hierarchy based on expertise makes very piffling sense. Everyone, barring concrete disabilities, is in principle able to be an proficient walker. Beyond the political, there is also a phenomenological dimension to walking which is quite deftly described by Solnit equally an "alignment betwixt listen, body and the world". Whoever has spent a couple of days on the trail knows that one time the rhythm has been established, one becomes much more alarm to minute variations in sensory input (smell, colour, temperatur). Meanwhile, the mind starts to wander much more freely. Solnit writes: "This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the heed is too a mural of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it." Solnit'southward smart and cogent survey of 3 centuries of walking is appropriately brought into relief by her supple and subtle prose which is a real pleasure to read. Her writing is warmly personal -
An circuit into fascinating territory
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years agone
In "Wanderlust" Rebecca Solnit weaves together myriad facets of the human being feel to chronicle the office of walking. As tin be expected, this is a complex topic, covering not just the details of geographic locale but the sociological and historical context of the subject as well. In this book, Solnit uses walking as both central theme and properties, using the topic equally a stepping stone to meander onto her ruminations on diverse topics. Her discursions are thought provoking, enlightening and diverse. It is almost equally if the author invites you to join her on a walk, sharing with you her insights on human condition. If not for the identify, fourth dimension and gender to which she is born, Solnit comes across as a "Peripatetic" - a wandering philosopher. At the stop of the book, one has the feeling of coming domicile from an excursion wiser and more thoughtful.
Pilgrimage is a liminal state
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 18 years ago
The history of walking is unwritten. Walking allows the states to be in our bodies in the world. The motions of the mind cannot be traced, but the feet tin. The author walks u.s.a. through an erstwhile Nike missile range. She protests with others at a Nevada test site. With Thoreau, Rebecca Solnit is both a poet of nature and a critic of club. Walking as a conscious cultural human activity begins with Rousseau. Nietzsche turned to solitary walks for recreation. In Rousseau's ideology walking is the keepsake of the simple human being. Rousseau portrays walking as both an exercise of simplicity and an opportunity for contemplation. Walking encourages a kind of unstructured associative thinking. A lone walker is both present and detached. Kierkegaard found himself in such a state. He proposed that the mind works all-time when surrounded by lark. Husserl claimed that by walking we empathize our bodies in relationship to the world. Walking upright preceded the development of the big brain in man. The pilgrimage is one of the bones modes of walking. There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in pilgrimage. The Civil Rights Movement was tempered with the imagery of pilgrimage more than than nigh struggles. The first fund-raising walk, a walkathon for the March of Dimes, began in 1970. On a religious pilgrimage in New Mexico the author encountered a Cadillac with the stations of the cantankerous painted on it. The promenade is a subset of walking. And then at that place is the customized car and the cruise--low riders. William and Dorothy Wordsworth were vigorous walkers. Wordsworth and his peers seem to exist the founders of a tradition. The English landscape garden asked to be explored. The emphasis on the pictorial and the existence of scenic tourism were invented in the eighteenth century. Walks are everywhere in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. The garden walk provided relief grade the group. Wordsworth tried to empathize the French Revolution by walking the streets of Paris. Walking was Wordsworth's means of composition. Hazlitt'south essay on walking became the foundation of a genre. Bruce Chatwin did non distinguish nomadism from walking. John Muir went from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys in 1867. Since English mountaineers found the Alpine Lodge in 1857, outdoor organizations have been proliferating. The first High Trip nether the auspices of the Sierra Club took identify in 1901. A taste for the wilderness is culturally adamant. Everywhere but in Britain, walking became hiking. In England and elsewhere there was a problem of access to the land. The Highland Clearances,1780-1855, for one example, displaced quantities of people. In 1824 the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was founded near York. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of land ownership just on paths, a sort of circulatory system of the whole. The YMCA was an early sponsor of walking clubs. The history of both urban and rural walking is a history of freedom. Dickens indicated the
Guide book to the restless
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
When I picked up this book at the local bookstore information technology was an impulse. Just after reading this book i found that it was exactly what I had been looking for. All my life I have been using walking as my way to unwind from school or just to vent some frustration. It seemed to reaffirm what I thought was my true path and showed my some ways to proceed the trip long. If you are the person who walks for the sake of walking or to focus your thoughts it's for y'all. If you are the type who does it to exersise or something else then im non then sure but all effectually its a good read for everyone.
Really Enjoyed Solnit's Perspective
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 21 years ago
I establish this book to be a fascinating read because of Solnit's writing style and because of her commentary on the subject of walking. Although I take always enjoyed walking myself Solnit helped me empathize some of the more philosophical reasons why. Contrary to the views of other reviewers Solnit does include her ain commentary such every bit her experience on the Chimayo pilgrimage and as a woman walking downwards the streets of her own neighborhood in San Francisco. One may say Why not read the people Solnit quotes rather than Wanderlust, simply the fact is Wanderlust increased my exposure to such works and helped me empathize their context. Her perspective on the history of the freedom to walk is truly eye-opening; we take information technology for granted that these days nosotros can pretty much walk anywhere we want to. Merely, it'south really an extended essay.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Mentions in Our Blog
Friluftsliv = Open Air Life
Published by Ashly Moore Sheldon • December 04, 2020
Our current circumstances have a lot of people talking about the Nordic tradition known equally friluftsliv (pronounced complimentary-loofts-liv). Translated as open air life, it is the thought of spending equally much time outdoors equally possible, no matter the atmospheric condition. And then go on out in that location!
Source: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/wanderlust-a-history-of-walking_rebecca-solnit/268146/
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