Wanderlust By, Rebecca Solnit

I am a distance walker, and enjoy the process of getting lost in the gratuitous open road, while listening to podcasts, music or the chirping of birds. In 17 quotable essays, Rebecca Solnit writes of walking as an art form; and proseletizes a relationship between walking and thinking. She offers a historical premise for the value of walking, in our automobile dependent world.

Beyond that, she exposes the value of walking as an experience, a way to explore the city by capturing the essence from the ground up."Walkers sre practitioners of the city, for the city is made to be walked. A city is language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, or selecting from those possibilities."

Ms. Solnit discusses the annals of walking, intermingling her own stories with quotes from historic artists, poets, writers, who were all known for walking as a form of meditation. She quotes from Balzac, Thoreau, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Voltaire, Samuel Beckett, Paul Klee, Pablo Neruda, Hamish Brown, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo,  Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe and Yoko Ono.

Ms. Solnit writes in poetic prose as she aptly describes the mechanics of walking as an art form:
"Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything, around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows along the path. And then, of myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal swinging of arms in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out almost as sinuous as a snake. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them. the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations, that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best places to explore the mind, and walking travels both terrains."

"And each walk moves through space like thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience."

"A lone walker is both present and detached from the world, more than an audience, but less than a participant."

Whether you enjoy sauntering, ambling, trekking, promenading in malls, alleyways, malls, mountains, small towns, large cities, gardens, the road less travelled, rambling, roaming, trails, this book will deepen your experience as you ponder the next path and decide to turn left or right?

Other Books By Rebecca Solnit:
Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir 2020
Men Explain Things to Me 2019
Whose Story is This? Old Concepts, New Chapters 2019
Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises 2018
The Mother of All Questions-Further Reports from the Feminist Revolution 2017
Hope in the Dark-Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities 2016
The Faraway Nearby 2013
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster 2010
A Field Guide to Getting Lost 2005