Walking

Overview

A thirty-page essay grown from a lecture Thoreau gave many times from 1851 and published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, a month after his death. He begins with the art of sauntering, which he derives from Sainte-Terre, the Holy Land, and says he needs four hours a day walking through woods and fields.

He notices that his steps tend westward, and takes this as an emblem of the nation’s movement toward wildness, declaring that in wildness is the preservation of the world. The Harvard Classics print it among fifteen essays by English and American writers.

What happens

Speaking a word for nature. Thoreau announces that he wishes to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as against a freedom and culture merely civil, and to regard man as an inhabitant of nature rather than a member of society.

The art of sauntering. He derives the word from Sainte-Terre, the Holy Land, so that the saunterer is a pilgrim, or alternatively from sans terre, without land, so that the walker who has no home is equally at home everywhere.

Four hours a day. Thoreau says he cannot preserve his health and spirits without at least four hours a day sauntering through woods and over hills and fields, and marvels at the shopkeepers who sit all day and have not committed suicide.

The westward tendency. He finds that when he goes out without a destination his steps turn west or southwest, away from the settled east, and reads this as the same instinct that drives the nation westward, toward the wild and the future.

Wildness. The essay’s centre declares that in wildness is the preservation of the world, and praises the wild in literature, in men, in the swamp he would choose over a garden, and in the untamed part of every domestic thing.

The evening walk. Thoreau closes with the setting sun seen from a meadow in November, the light so warm and serene that he thinks it might shine into our minds and hearts one day, and that we will saunter toward the Holy Land.

How to read it

Read the etymology of sauntering as a joke that carries a serious claim, the walker made a pilgrim and a landless man at once, and notice how much of the essay’s argument the wordplay sets in motion.

Pay close attention to what Thoreau means by wildness, which is a quality he finds in Hamlet and the Iliad and in a swamp as much as in unsettled land, before taking the famous sentence as a slogan for wilderness preservation.

Notice how the westward tendency of his walks links the private habit to the nation’s expansion, and weigh what that link celebrates and what it fails to see.

Consider the essay’s date, delivered as a lecture through the 1850s and published at his death, as a distillation of Walden’s argument into thirty pages.

Read this essay alongside Walden to see the long experiment and its concentrated creed side by side, and decide which form serves Thoreau’s thought better.

Questions it raises

• What does Thoreau mean by wildness, if he can find it in Homer and in a swamp alike, and how far has the conservation movement’s use of his sentence departed from him?
• Is four hours a day of walking a serious prescription, or a provocation aimed at the shopkeepers, and what does the essay assume about who can afford it?
• How should a modern reader take the westward tendency, with its echo of the continent’s conquest? Does Thoreau’s love of the wild have room for the peoples who already lived in it?
• Is the saunterer who is at home everywhere really free, or simply exempt from the ties that make a home?
• Why does the essay end with a sunset rather than an argument, and what does the closing image of light shining into our minds claim that the reasoning could not?
• What is lost and gained when a lecture given many times over a decade is fixed in print, and does the essay still sound like something spoken?