All quoted (and green) material is referenced from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” found in a compilation of his work Civil Disobedience and Other Essays.
"Knights of a new, or rather an old, order...No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom and independence, which are the capital of this profession…You must be born into the family of the Walkers.” I have known of Thoreau since high school English. I remember an expert from Walden about ants; it resolved some of my confusion regarding war. Then my brother sends me Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. I started “Civil Disobedience” and decided that more discussions of poor governance and war would never resolve my confusion. So I moved onto “Walking”. This essay describes my life; or rather a vital part of it. Nothing soothes my savage beast like a good walk. As a child 5 minutes of walking, through the pines of Northern Arizona, could bring more composure than just about anything I can remember. “More over you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” If I used day dreams to escape, my imagination soared when walking: on backpacking trips, on the way home from school…As Program Director for Southwest Conservation Corps. “But sometimes it happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run through my head and I am not where my body is, -I am out of my senses.” Lucky for me even at SCC, where I allowed my job to become my life, I could always escape with a good hike. Some hikes I took while directing were so soothing that I might say they saved my life/job. “Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufacturers and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all, -I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.” On one such hike I remember looking up from the spread of Tucson’s lights, which I viewed from atop the Catalina Mountains, to see the moon and a big sky full of stars. It reminded me that I was a tiny speck in a big old universe, and that whether or not I hired enough people or secured enough project weeks really did not matter that much. And that in the end I would be just fine. I heard a family, who was camping next to the spot where I stood, remark on the moon. I felt too shy to join them; so I wrote a note. Letting them know I appreciated their company; though from afar. I slipped it under their wiper, climbed into my Subaru and floated down Catalina Highway.
“You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest who were the discovers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America…” I remind myself that I am a tiny speck and whether or not I succeed…Or whether my thoughts help America recapture itself… “Walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentlemen’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 that evil day comes.” Pros: we have our public lands, we are moving towards a widespread environmental consciousness, the world is beautiful. Cons: the beast consumes our wild places ravenously, in times of need our government turns public to private with the signing of a deed, our Dream is currently clouded by consumerism and a biased media. Ahhh…But perhaps I’ve gone too deep. “To forget the old world and it’s institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance left for this” species. Thoreau provides the answer: “I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher and more ethereal, as our sky, -our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains, -our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests, -and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of leata or glabra, of joyous and serene, in our faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?” Yes it is idealistic. But I think the hope of America lies in an obsession with joy and serenity, as opposed to accumulation of property, image, medications, and so on and so forth. This hope requires that each citizen exhibit heroic tendencies “for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.” Stand up America, make the right choices. “That in wildness is the preservation of the world...A town is saved, not more by the righteousness of the men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted...Alas for human culture! Little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. In short all good things are wild and free...American liberty has become a fiction of the past, - as it is to some extent a fiction of the present, -the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
I have one major criticism of Thoreau’s “Walking”. He demoralizes the very answer which he seeks. “The very winds blew the Indians cornfield into the meadows, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to entrench himself in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with a plow and a spade.” Tools and language; they make us human. But at this point in time we master so completely, with technology and media; that they truly are entrenching us. So what did the indigenous people of America, and elsewhere, do differently? Or rather what ideology, or religion, guided their lives? I do not know the answer. What I do know is that Western cultures operate under an assumption that this world was created for our use; that humans were given the right to anything and everything from mammal to conifer to mineral. We are not part of this world. “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around us, with such beauty and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is so exclusively an interaction of man on man, -a sort of breeding in and in, … a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.” Once again I delve too deep. I apologize. I do not mean to criticize. I appreciate the beauty of language, the comforts afforded by modern technologies. But we must redirect our path. I have no words to describe my love of this world and the people which fill it. “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of the earth cultivated. Part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation it supports.” Must we have the answer to every detail? So many of our resources are dedicated to the accumulation of knowledge. To what end? "A man's ignorance is sometimes not only usefull, but beautiful, -while his knowledge, so called, is often worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, -he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all? My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bath my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. Live free, child of the mist, -and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.” While walking my mind flies free. No worries of validity, nor value, tie it down. “We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Koouos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.”
We praise reason and rationality, but do not understand, an understanding that comes not from our eyes nor the left side of our brains, how to live with this world. Have we sacrificed belonging and purpose, in our stoic quest for logic? Thoreau ends his essay with a dreamy description of an imaginary family and accurate account of an earthly sunset. Perhaps the passages seem ill-placed in a critically acclaimed essay? Or do they? “We saunter towards the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than he has ever done, shall perchance shine into our hearts and minds, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.” Only that it happens before I pass into the great unknown of afterlife.
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