Wanderlust : History of Walking – Rebecca Solnit/Granta (2001)
If W. H Auden’s poem ‘Walks’ is, and probably always will be, the most succinct addition to this series on literature related to walks and walking(by the way I should add here that Auden wrote the libretto for Glyndebourne’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’, the composer being Stravinsky and the set designer, David Hockney), then Rebecca Solnit’s book on walking(reissued recently in paperback), relishes the nearly encyclopaedic task she sets for herself. She doesn’t press on towards a goal but savours detail and varied perspectives, considering the nature of mountaineering, the life of the London streetwalker, the conflict of public rights of way and private property in England and the USA. She joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, palaeontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism. Hers is a sinuous course propelled by abandon yet guided by a firm intelligence. It is full of enthusiasm for simply getting about on foot ,wherever and whenever; it is streaked with an activism that makes her willing to cheer all kinds of applied walking including protest, pilgrimage, therapy and exercise.
For her final chapter Rebecca is looking for ‘a last tour of one of the sites of walking’s history and that locale(starting at Chatsworth and heading to the Peak District) seemed to have everything. But then she decides that proving that it’s easy to walk in a well-known part of Britain didn’t say anything about the future of walking. So ‘one December morning I stepped out ….onto Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas…’ ‘One of the least celebrated aspects of this arid, amnesiac boomtown is its spectacular setting, with mountain ranges on three sides and glorious desert light, but Las Vegas has never been about nature appreciation. Las Vegas means ‘the meadows’….
‘I was hot and weary from the four miles or so I’d gone from Fremont Street, for it was a warm day and the air was stale with exhaust. Distance is deceptive on the Strip: the major intersections are about a mile apart, but the new casinos with their twenty or thirty hotel towers tend to look closer because their scale doesn’t register….’
That night we would sleep out near Red Rocks(a 13 mile long sandstone escarpment west of Vegas….).In the morning our guide would lead us along a trail snaking up and down across small arroyos(small deep -sided gullies) and a dry streambed, past the gorgeous foliage I remembered from earlier trips, junipers with desert mistletoe, tiny-leafed desert oaks ,yuccas, manzanitas, and an occasional barrel cactus, all stunted and spread sparsely by the rocky soil, aridity, and scattered boulders in a way that recalls Japanese gardens….When I turned back to look at Las Vegas and the Strip as I had so often looked at Red Rocks the day before, Paul(her guide), would say, ‘Don’t look back,’ but I would stare , amazed how thick the city’s smog was…’
‘Afterwards I would spend the afternoon wandering in flatter terrain, ambling along the few trails alongside the clear rushing water of Pine Creek, exploring another canyon, turning back to watch the shadows over the hills grow longer and the light thicker and more golden, as though the air could turn to honey; honey that would dissolve into the returning night.’
‘Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination and the wide-open-world. And though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them – drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes- that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are travelled still.’
Auden was also careful to remember that poetry must give pleasure and rarely exploited it for the purpose of complaint. In his later poems such as the one below, he sought on every occasion to give thanks. All the different periods of his poetic output were alike in considering the poetic vocation as a sacred trust: the perfection of the work over perfection in the life.
And yet for Auden there was always a danger in poetry becoming too introspective or high-minded. He believed in a perfectly practical way, that its function was moral and parabolic, that it could work instructively on any of the many levels at which the human mind functions (‘even a limerick ought to be something a man of honour could be read without contempt’). In 1936, speaking to the Workers’ Educational Association, he put it another way: ‘Really to appreciate archdeacons , you must know some barmaids, and vice versa. The same applies to poetry.’