Not too long ago, I ordered Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust” on Amazon, which, looking back, appears a violation of the guide’s instruction to stroll on this planet, the place you possibly can “discover what you don’t know you’re on the lookout for.” It was February in New York, and I had been current in what Solnit calls “a sequence of interiors—dwelling, automobile, fitness center, workplace, outlets.” (Minus the fitness center, naturally). I learn her guide with desires of roaming. In it, she traces strolling’s relationship to tradition and politics, finding out the ambles of poets, philosophers, revolutionaries, and, in a exceptional chapter, girls combating for the suitable to wander and muse as males do, with out hoop skirts or scandal. If strolling provides “the unpredictable incidents . . . that add as much as a life,” Solnit writes, anybody dissuaded from it’s denied a “huge portion of their humanity.”
But “Wanderlust” can also be a requiem for strolling, a observe slowly excised by our period’s “nervousness to provide.” Issues have solely gotten gloomier since 2000, when Solnit printed the guide; she had but to satisfy the modern walker, who, if something like me, returns from a stroll having encountered not “new ideas and potentialities” however the acquainted app-strewn panorama of her smartphone. When Solnit writes that journey is turning into “much less vital than arrival,” she is referring to autos and computer systems, which ship issues like her guide to my door with out the delight of occurring upon them exterior. However she may additionally have been describing Instagram, which, although meant to channel expertise and journey, provides no journey between photographs posted for public affirmation. Is it doable for wanderlust to be its personal reward? Solnit describes strolling, in our time, as “the scenic route by means of a half-abandoned panorama of concepts and experiences.” To stroll, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour.” Which will nonetheless be the case. The subversion, although, may lie in telling nobody else about it.
