Wanderlust
A History of Walking
Chapter One
Tracing a Headland:
An Introduction
Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between
the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel
touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the
foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body
shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step
and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of
walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking
that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy,
allegory, and heartbreak.
The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be
found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets,
and almost everyone's adventures. The bodily history of walking is that of bipedal
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