wanderlust a review

Sun, May 22, 2011

It was quite hard going at first, Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, A History of Walking. The first couple of chapters are specifically American but then the story wanders over to Europe and tackles the likes of Wordsworth and Jane Austen but quite simply, this book blows every modern outdoor writer out of the water. It’s so utterly refreshing to read about the outdoors from such a completely different perspective. When confronted with the purple flowery trash that pretends to be outdoors prose these days, terms such as “resonate”, “liminal”, “profound”, “beetling” and other such tripe just washes over me as it’s never, ever used in context. The context is all in the writer’s head and very rarely does it make it onto the page. So you’re left trying to decipher what the real meaning is. Noam Chomsky is one of the world’s best intellectuals but he’s an appalling communicator. You have to work in his field to understand him. Similarly, most outdoors writers these days expect you to follow along with the purple prose and if you don’t understand it, well, you’re not really one of the modern beat generation they’re trying to recreate.

In stark contrast, Wanderlust is full of context. It’s overflowing with it. The writing is subtly magnificent. Each chapter builds on the last and each paragraph within a chapter draws the previous ideas together and the reasoning is so clear you don’t have to make mental leaps of faith to try to understand what’s going on. Instead this book, instead of taunting your imagination with opaque and vaporous notions, writes it a prescription which takes the ideas right to the centre of who you are and leaves your imagination free to apply those ideas to what you’ve seen around you, in your daily life. Because this book is about just that. You. It’s about the bit in the middle between the elysian paradise of the wilderness and the emotions that go with it. It’s about the thing that creates those emotions. You. The Human Being.

I’m so fed up reading outdoors writers these days who leave you feeling guilty, ashamed, downtrodden, for allowing the world to get into the state they tersely rant about. They never include themselves strangely enough. This book places what we see and what we do, as walking human beings, into context. The connections throughout history are just epiphanic. I’ve always said there’s a reason for everything and this book describes the reasons for what we see today. It’s ground breaking. I just love it.

From Petrach to Perrin, the relentless surge of progress has resulted in “disembodiment”, quite literally and for the first time I now understand what that term means and it’s frightening. In much the same way the artisans of pre-industrial society were reverse engineered into their constituent skills and reassembled in machinery, so we have been subjected to the same process. The parallels with the horse are also truly eye opening and you’ll never see a gym in the same light after reading this book.

One of the most moving chapters, for me, was the exploration of walking as a woman. From the obscene treatment of Victorian British women while the men walked unhindered, to the mountaineer Gwen Moffat’s heartfelt account of being abused on Skye, this was truly humbling narrative. Those who’s knee jerk reaction to the middle east’s treatment of women should look closer to home. As I read this chapter, the Jane Austen novels and their use of walking in the heroine’s story suddenly came to life in a way I could never have imagined. This chapter provided the context for that literature and put a car jack between the novels’ lines and cranked them wide open, the easier for you to see the real life of the author who wrote them.

It seems the world’s woes are down to the concept of disembodiment and the contraction of space and time. A heady mix of terms indeed but when you have no use for a body other than to get your brain onto and off mechanised transport, what worth is the world anyway? other than the bit that gets in the way between you and your destination. No-one walks any more and yet no-one also realises the wonderful machinery we all contain that once started up, brings the outdoors inside us. The world we walk through influences us. Think of song lines in the desert. We become one with the earth. Today though, we walk to the car and the car talks to us. It entices us with ways to spend our vastly increased free time. Free time that is spent travelling longer and longer distances between increasingly car friendly cities where pavements are privatised and standing still is illegal. Rather than the earth speaking to us through our bodies’ movement over its surface, we are seduced by our own mechanical inventions and the world bears the scars of the result of that infatuation. Both the natural world bristling with turbines and walled with dams and the human, obese, lumbering, sick bodies crying out to be set free to be themselves again.

In short, this book takes the biological and ecological foundations created by humans and applies them to that self same race and the result is truly remarkable. The wonderful thing was, I read most of it after a morning walk during a storm that brought with it violent winds and huge stinging blobs of rain that flew from a black sky. It was when I reached the description of disembodiment that everything fell into place and I suddenly knew what it is to be a simple human being.

If you only ever read one more outdoors oriented book in your life, make it this one. You won’t be disappointed.