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Rebecca solnit book7/6/2023 When Solnit writes that travel is becoming “less important than arrival,” she is referring to vehicles and computers, which deliver things like her book to my door without the delight of happening upon them outside. Yet “Wanderlust” is also a requiem for walking, a practice slowly excised by our era’s “anxiety to produce.” Things have only gotten gloomier since 2000, when Solnit published the book she had yet to meet the contemporary walker, who, if anything like me, returns from a stroll having encountered not “new thoughts and possibilities” but the familiar app-strewn landscape of her smartphone. If walking supplies “the unpredictable incidents . . . that add up to a life,” Solnit writes, anyone dissuaded from it is denied a “vast portion of their humanity.” In it, she traces walking’s relationship to culture and politics, studying the ambles of poets, philosophers, revolutionaries, and, in a remarkable chapter, women fighting for the right to wander and muse as men do, without hoop skirts or scandal. Recently, I ordered Rebecca Solnit’s “ Wanderlust” on Amazon, which, in retrospect, seems a violation of the book’s instruction to walk in the world, where you can “find what you don’t know you are looking for.” It was February in New York, and I had been existing in what Solnit calls “a series of interiors-home, car, gym, office, shops.” (Minus the gym, naturally).
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