The contemporary essayist Rebecca Solnit renovates Woolf’s metaphor, writing in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007): “the straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. Having lost her thought at a border enforced by patriarchy, Woolf raises the problems of wandering, trespassing, and thinking as a woman. Woolf next remarks: “What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing, I could not now remember.” She is immediately intercepted, however, by “a man’s figure” and told to use the gravel path.
While she sits beside the river, thought lets “its line down into the stream , letting the water lift it and sink it, until-you know the little tug-the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line.” Upon hauling in the thought, Woolf remarks that it might be best “put back.” Yet once put back, the thought excites her again, and Woolf walks off “with extreme rapidity” over the Oxbridge grass. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf famously speaks of the way a thought comes upon her.
With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction – from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina’s Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton’s Nadja – Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.For Rebecca Solnit and Virginia Woolf, thought travels by detour and collision. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act.
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