Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust, A History of Walking — “In a sense the car has become a prosthetic..."

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking “In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are...

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Friday, November 27, 2015

From NYTimes.com — A Stroll Around the World

This essay in the NY Times was circulating on social media and blogs a couple of weeks ago. Pulitzer Prize-winning National Geographic journalist Paul Salopek sets out from Ethiopia to “walk across the world”.

The “Out of Eden Walk,” as I’m calling it, uses deep history as a mirror for current events. But even as I adhere strictly to my brand of bipedal journalism, trying as it were to put myself in a Pleistocene state of mind, cars keep roaring into my awareness. They are inescapable. They are without a doubt the defining artifacts of our civilization. They have reshaped our minds in ways that we long ago ceased thinking about.

There are two insights in the essay which I continue to find useful, even profound — 1, the car as prosthetic:

The writer Rebecca Solnit nails this mind-set perfectly in her book “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”: “In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.” — Salopek calls it “Car Brain”.

And 2. When behind the wheel motorists “squint with curiosity out of the privacy of their cars as if they themselves were invisible.” When we first sit behind that wheel all our instincts tell us that we need to exercise extreme caution in mastering skills which are deeply foreign to us. White knuckles and cold sweat. Entirely appropriate reactions which are soon followed by the overconfidence that operating huge vehicles at high speed requires no care or anxiety on our part at all. No more than walking across a room. We become a kind of invisible.

As has been well documented, this hubris is reinforced by the way we have designed our cities. More precisely the way planners and engineers have laid out the street and road systems that have in turned designed our cities. Huge investments in public space — city streets — have been allocated almost exclusively to automobiles, the vast majority of which contain a single citizen. Read more: A Stroll Around the World - NYTimes.com. 

Ships of the desert, one of them wrecked. On the Red Sea coast of the #Hejaz, #SaudiArabia. #Edenwalk pic.twitter.com/LB9quGFrcU

— Paul Salopek (@PaulSalopek) December 5, 2013

Paul Salopek on Twitter: @PaulSalopek 
Out of Eden Walk
Out Of Eden Walk - Dispatches from the Field from Paul Salopek

"It is exactly this social mobility...that gives the street its danger and magic." Rebecca Solnit-- Wanderlust, A History of Walking.

— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) May 3, 2015

From BBC News Magazine — The slow death of purposeless walking

BBC News - The slow death of purposeless walking https://t.co/ONWbWjY9xR vía @ethel_baraona

— Martina Deren (@MartinaDeren) February 10, 2016

It is the "just to walk" category that is so beloved of creative thinkers.  

"There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively," says Geoff Nicholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking.. 

"Your senses are sharpened. As a writer, I also use it as a form of problem solving. I'm far more likely to find a solution by going for a walk than sitting at my desk and 'thinking'. 

"Being out on your own, being free and anonymous, you discover the people around you," says Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Read more: BBC News Magazine — The slow death of purposeless walking