Walking

A beautiful essay about walking and what the untamed wild nature does to the human spirit as well as writers and artists. Te first half of the essay is about walking and in the last half focus shift to the wonders of nature. I especially liked the first half which was thoughts about walking, where to walk, and why the west is always so alluring to him and possibly others. This essay is from 1862 and therefore not easy to read and understand yet a lot of its thoughts, questions, and points are still very much relevant today.

I randomly picked this book up solely based on the title. It came up as a suggested ebook and I didn't realise who the author was until I had started it. Had I known it was him I would probably not have read this book. With what I know of him and his writing it is not my cup of tea, and with this book I have been proven right in my assumptions about it. I was hoping for a book of nature and of the sensation of walking in it and although this book does have that, this is a book with a purpose and therefore a bit aggressive. I wanted a book of ponderings of walking in nature and not a political standpoint showed in my face. I also got very annoyed at his strong American patriotism. America as the land of the future and so forth.

One of my favorite things.

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society." "Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap." "For I believe that climate does thus react on man—as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? 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 seale, 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." "Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library—aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature." "I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this." "So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill—and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry." "Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past." I am frustrated. Frustrated by the bounds and constraints of the modern world on the wild spirit of my inner self. Frustrated by the small amounts of growth and exploration my body and mind allows. I yearn to feel in touch with, in sync with, nature. I used to dismiss nature as lesser, boring, dirty, uncomfortable. We are all alienated from our roots while we are indoctrinated into society. But now I yearn to be free of the restraints of society. Of the daily responsibilities and anxieties imposed upon me by the structures I once rushed to embrace out of fear of insecurity and rejection. I want to be free.