Wrap-Up for "Walking"

Thoreau starts off by saying that he is going to make an "extreme statement" for Nature. His argument is that there are plenty of people making statements for civilization and society in general. This really is a remarkable essay when one considers when it was written. In 1862 conservation was not something on everybody's mind. Many places in America were still wild, many Native Americans still lived the way they had for centuries. The land was big and abundant and little time was spent worrying about the future. As one example of the lack of respect for Nature that Thoreau was writing consider the bison (buffalo) of America. They were being hunted ruthlessly—for no other reason than just to kill them. By the end of the 19th century they would be nearly extinct. 100 years earlier it is estimated that there were 60 million of these animals. Thoreau wrote in one of his journals:

This hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting neighbor's horses. These are God's own horses, poor timid creatures . . .¹

Thoreau's idea of a walk is that it should be an adventure, that the walker should be able to truly see those things around him as if he were viewing them for the first time, as if he had just landed on a new planet. The walk is not a practical experience, that is, it is not meant to get you from point A to point B. If you look at walking in that way you will miss it. The walk itself is the goal. You must live in the moment of the walk. Thoreau goes on to say that you must walk both in body and in spirit. If you walk and all you can think about are the troubles you've left behind you or the things you have to do when you finish your walk, well, in Thoreau's eyes you have not really walked.

The idea is to be free. Free in your mind. Notice what he says about his walks: "absolutely free from all worldly engagements." This is no easy task as Thoreau admits. You can't be in the woods if your mind is out of the woods.

Thoreau can't understand the shopkeepers who sit in their shops all day year after year after year. It is doubtful he would be able to understand the many people who work 6 and 7 days a week year after year to insure they can keep their big houses and cars and so many of the other things that Thoreau would say we do not need.

Thoreau saw the trouble coming. This is one of the more prophetic passages from the essay:

But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities then before the evil days come. (p. 56)

Have the evil days come? You'll have to decide that one.

Thoreau, like many of the pilgrims that first came to America, saw this country almost as the "promised land," a place where the intellect could soar to greater heights than it ever had before. He wrote of living in America, "Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences?"

Thoreau thinks that we have lost something in civilization. He prefers what he calls "Wildness." He argues that it is only Wildness, not civilization, that refreshes and nurtures mankind. Wildness is what will give us a future, not more cities, or more roads or more bandwidth. Thoreau prefers the swamp to the mansion. But why? He says that Nature is what restores him, what nourishes him. It is important to note that this "Wildness" is not simply found in nature. He writes, "In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us." In that category he places Hamlet and the Iliad and the "Scriptures and Mythologies." Here there may be clue as to what Thoreau is trying to say.

In his discussion of Wild literature he writes, "Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like lightning's flash . . ." I think Thoreau might be saying the same thing about Nature. What is Wildness? It is that thing that makes the darkness visible, it is that thing that helps us see things as they really are. What is great literature? It is, quite often, that which points out what we know to be true in ourselves. "That wouldn't happen!" we might exclaim about a story we hear, but when someone utters a story that reminds us or reveals to us a truth about ourselves we might say, "That's exactly the way I feel."

However, Thoreau then goes on to say that no literature reflects exactly what he is trying to say. He says mythology comes the closest. Why? Because he says it grew out of good soil, the old soil, it was the original and everything else springs from it.

Thoreau says we have to be careful in the way that we use Knowledge. There is kind of knowledge that makes us ignorant and a kind of knowledge that shows us our ignorance. The latter is the kind of knowledge that Thoreau advocates. The best kind of knowledge, he says, is that which gives us a "sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before . . ." Knowledge must liberate us, it must be practical, if it is not it is useless, it is, as the the Vishnu Purana says "only the cleverness of an artist."

This "Wildness" and "art of Walking" are also realized by not living in the present. Thoreau says that we "cannot afford not to live in the present." We waste our time remembering the past and, to some degree it seems to me, contemplating the future. The present is all we really and truly have. There may be, for you or me, no tomorrow and in truth there is not, because when it gets here it is today, it is now. The true Walker lives in the moment. If in the moment we worry about the past or the the future we miss the present, the only place that we actually and truly live.

Sources:

¹Thoreau, Henry David quoted in Murphy, Jim. Into the Deep Forest with Henry David Thoreau, Clarion Books, New York. 1995. p. 21.