Walking back to happiness

That Guthrie idea, subliminally or not, has coloured most of what people have written about walking. To stand up and walk, to set out in the world on your own two feet, to make yourself, if this is an allowable phrase, erect, has always been seen as a manly thing to do, a form of conquest and display. Solnit points out that all the great walkers of the 19th century from Hazlitt to Leslie Stephen, in all their apparently relaxed and conversational style, cannot prevent themselves from telling you what to do, how to do it, how not to. Even Bruce Chatwin, the 20th century heir to that tradition, can at times adopt a bossy and exhortatory tone. Men walkers, at least in this British tradition, have always in their subtle ways aimed to dominate.

Solnit, a radical peace activist from San Francisco, has little truck with any of that. Although she is not really fair to the classic moments of English mountain walking (Coleridge's journals for his wild and ecstatic Lake District summer in 1802 would blow apart her thesis that English walking has always been sterilised by its gentlemanliness), nevertheless her rejection of that all-too-famous tradition leads her into rich and fascinating new paths. Her ideal walker is not the lecturing mountaineer, but the subtler and slighter figure of the alienated solitary in the city, without baggage and without programme, exposed to the contingent realities which a city thrusts at a person on foot. The true and essential walker is an alienated soul who "feels at home in his alienation". She resuscitates the now forgotten figure of Restif de la Bretonne who, in 1780s Paris, wrote volume after volume describing his wanderings through the city at night, "spying on politicians in debate and aristocrats in adultery, seeing crimes, fires, mobs, cross-dressers, a freshly murdered corpse". For Bretonne, as for many who came after him, Paris was "a book, a wilderness, and a sort of erogenous zone, or bedroom". Only walking, in its nakedness and its invisibility, its kind of innocence, could expose you to the world you need to know.

Solnit has a point to make: walking, in this non-dominating and absorbent way, is necessary to the life of the city. Walkers, she says, quoting the French psycho-geographer Michel de Certeau, "are ' practitioners of the city' ... the city is made to be walked, a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities". This intriguing idea has its down side. In America, the human body, once seen as a work horse, is now treated as a pet, given outings in a gym and perhaps occasionally on a hike but otherwise driven from place to place. Solnit has watched people in San Francisco-queuing in their cars waiting for a parking slot immediately outside the shop where they are going to buy their mountaineering boots. If people stop walking in their cities, as they have in America, then in some ways the meaning of the city disappears. "A post-pedestrian city," Rebecca Solnit says, "has not only fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives." Streets need the ruissellement de paroles, the rustling stream of words to stay alive. Walking, by somehow integrating the body, the mind and the inhabited place, civilises the world.