Human beings walk on two legs, so what? Why a history of walking? Was this just a quixotic idea in the competitive world of book production? The reader is in for a surprise: this book is a tour de force of erudition in which the author leads one on a journey of discovery along the highways and byways of philosophy and literature, anatomy and anthropology with detours to visit art, politics, architecture and revolution. Rebecca Solnit first establishes a link between walking and thinking - the mind working on ideas and problems at three miles an hour. She refers to philosophers from Aristotle to Rousseau and Kierkegaard who exercised their minds as well as their limbs, but it was Wordsworth who elevated walking to a religion, and this book reintroduces readers to poems developed on long tramps over the hills and dales of the Lake District.
Solnit takes us on actual walks of her own: a ramble in the Sierras; a pilgrimage to Chimay≤ in New Mexico; walking around the Nevada nuclear test site; and to a Birmingham G8 protest in 1998 campaigning for cancellation of Third World debt.
Along the way are the newest theories of when the ancestral ape got up on its hind legs, and a rich tapestry of the literature of walking, of pilgrimages, processions, protests and street parties.
Walking in the city has an honourable literary provenance. She gives a cameo of two writers, of poor sight, passing each other on the streets of Paris: James Joyce, "the exiled Catholic . . . who had written a novel about a Jew wandering the streets of Dublin" and Walter Benjamin, "the exiled Berlin Jew strolling the Paris streets while writing . . . about a Catholic, Charles Baudelaire, walking and writing the streets of Paris". She walked from "downtown" Dublin to Kilmainham Hospital to see Marina Abramovic's sculptures of amethyst shoes in the Museum of Modern Art.
Among regrets about the architectural changes in modern cities that make them inhospitable to walkers, Solnit is concerned about the inactivity of the post-modern body. No longer used as a method of getting from A to B, but shuttled around by airplanes and cars, "it does not move but is moved".
"Having been liberated from manual labour and located in the sensory deprivation chamber of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic (and bodily functions) as a residue of what it means to be embodied . . . because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people." That, of course, is the white-collar, urban body.
The gym, she says, has replaced bodily exertion; it is a kind of wildlife preserve to accommodate the survival of bodies. And she quotes an anecdote about fishermen in a remote village of the Dominican Republic puzzling over an advertisement for a rowing machine. "Indoors? . . . They row without water? And without fish? And without sun? And without sky?"
Rich as it is, the book could have done with tighter editing, and there is one very irritating design fault. Quotations run along the bottom of each page rather than at the beginning of chapters. Do you read them as you turn the page? Go back to them at the end of the chapter? Or . . . forget it!
Ethna Viney is a writer and critic