On walking and structure
I live in a very walkable neighborhood in Chicago, and have walked almost everywhere I need to go daily for more than a decade. I’ve been thinking more about the meaning of all this walking in the last few years, mostly by building a reading list on the topic and informally going through it. One of the best I’ve read is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
The book came out more than twenty years ago, in 2000, but I see no evidence that advances in technology or changes in society have dated it. Walking has had the status of a gratuitously simple, stubbornly un-innovative way of getting around for at least 100 years. Because it is so obvious that walking is behind the times, whenever there is a desire to return to basics, or a burst of nostalgia for simple things–at that point the topic of walking will be due for a revival. I think we had one last year, during the pandemic.
What I have taken from Solnit’s book is that walking is one of those subtle, mostly deniable ways in which people express a disdain for hierarchy, routine and structure. The authorities that offer an alternative to walking–businesses, governments–do it because they think everyone wants to eliminate downtime between the appointed parts of that day; people insist on that time. The walker is neither here nor there, in a liminal state (51), dropped off the official record. Walking remains one of the best ways to disguise doing nothing (5). Walking “connects different interiors” which would otherwise remain unconnected (9). The spaces between, for example, the gym and the workplace, can have meaning if a person is in a position to look at them. And finally, because walking is too ordinary to be interesting, it has no true experts (ix), only amateurs who use it for their own reasons.
Sources
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000.