Rebecca Solnit, "The Solitary Stroller and the City "
It is not surprising that Rebecca Solnit, an author with far-ranging interests, would be the one to write Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000). Unaffiliated with any university or other institution, Solnit has pursued her interests without regard to disciplinary, temporal, or geographical boundaries. In the words of one Columbia Journalism Review assessment, “irrepressible curiosity has led her to investigate and reflect on a diverse range of subjects: landscapes both rural and urban, politics, the environment, indigenous people, technology, gender, art, and photography. Each of the labels that have been used to describe her—historian, journalist, cultural theorist, critic, activist—bumps up against the others.”
Prior to Wanderlust, Solnit wrote two books of art criticism, another about her ancestral homeland called A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (1997). The same year that she published Wanderlust, Solnit published Hollow City (2000), a book about the changing cultural landscape of her hometown, San Francisco. She later turned her attention to nineteenth-century photography and the evolution of motion-capture media technology, in the award-winning River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), which she followed up in 2004 with Hope in the Dark, a celebration of political protest. Solnit’s wandering intellect returned to its fascination with the pathways and byways that we take in life with A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).
“The Solitary Stroller and the City,” a chapter from Solnit’s history of walking, explores the many elements of human experience and the many sides of human character that emerge in the course of a stroll on the city streets. “The word street,” Solnit points out, “has a rough, dirty magic to it. It conjures up images of transgressions and encounters that could only take place on public paths.” For Solnit, streets are more than just the space left over between buildings: they constitute a vital public space that has, throughout history, served intermittently as the staging ground for revolutionary movements and the field for flirting young people. Though it offers its share of dangers and unsavory possibility, Solnit champions urban walking as a cultural activity of great import both in the past and in the present, when “consumption and production” are the organizing values of our cities.
“The straight line of conventional narrative,” Solnit writes in the introduction to Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007), her most recent book, “is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it.” By resisting the straight lines of such narratives, Solnit’s prose mirrors the content of her books. Her cultural history of walking is just one of several demonstrations of what a mind can discover when set to wander.
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Penguin, 2000.
Quotationss are drawn, in the order that they appear, from “Room to Roam,” a Q&A conducted by Peter Terzian for the July/August 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, and from "The Solitary Stroller and the City."
Digital image drawn from Rebecca Solnit's Redroom profile.
Link to Explore:
Articles by Rebecca Solnit.
A San Francisco Chronicle profile of Rebecca Solnit.
Time, an episode of WNYC's Radiolab podcast that includes a conversation with Rebecca Solnit. This episode also features Oliver Sacks.
Question for Connecting:
- In “The Power of Context,” Malcolm Gladwell argues that the rundown condition of New York City in 1984 played a significant role in leading Bernhard Goetz to shot four young men on the subway. Does this argument extend, contradict, or reinforce Solnit’s observations about the effects of urban walking? Can Gladwell’s argument be used to explain Solnit’s experience? If context is so powerful, can any experience be said to be personal?
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