“Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” If you like to walk, read, create, write and change the world, Wanderlust is fuel. It is the perfect walking companion and will encourage you to walk more.
It reshaped both the intellectual world and the physical one, sending populations of travelers to hitherto obscure destinations, creating innumerable parks, preserves, trails, guides, clubs, and organizations and a vast body or art and literature with almost no precedent before the eighteenth century.” “It is impossible to overemphasize how profound is the effect of this revolution on the taste for nature and practice of walking. Readers of EcoLit may be particularly interested in the second section of the book, “From the Garden to the Wild,” which includes information about the Sierra Club and its founder John Muir who, “…took a stand against anthropocentrism, against the idea that trees, animals, minerals, soil, water, are there for human to use, let alone to destroy.” Solnit writes about how, as walking, hiking and mountaineering became popular, people began to take an interest in nature again. Side treks include Thoreau’s “Walking,” Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in a Fictional Wood. Along the way, she offers numerous side trails to explore introducing works by walking philosophers and the genre of the walking essay. Solnit examines the spirituality, history, literature, and political implications of walking. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” Wanderlust falls into the latter category, but it is the pick for EcoLit readers. A Paradise Built in Hell), fascinating if the topic interests. There are her lyrically written, inventive essays (the extremely beautiful The Faraway Nearby for example) and her obsessively researched academic books (i.e. Solnit writes a couple of different kind of books. “Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.” Solnit reminds us that walking is an intellectual, spiritual, and revolutionary pursuit and can be a creative and empowering act. The journey is enjoyable and ultimately rewarding.īest of all, this book will make you want to get out into the world and walk. Along the way, the book catches your attention with a beautiful point of insight or takes you to a soaring vista.
At times, you may wonder what you have gotten yourself into, but you happily trek on. Reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) is a lot like talking a hike.
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