Walking

"... in Wildness is the preservation of the World"

Introduction: Simply Walking - by Mark Stabb

Walking in three parts: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

"Few writers of any era or discipline have exerted so great and lasting an influence on American culture's configuration of the man-nature relationship as did Henry David Thoreau, whose writings on the subject defined both a literary form -- the nature essay -- and a seminal philosophical understanding." - introduction to Excursions at the Library of Congress site.

Walking began as a lecture called "The Wild," delivered by Henry at the Concord Lyceum on April 23, 1851. He gave this lecture many times, developing it into the essay finally published in the Atlantic Monthly after his death, in 1862.

Margaret M. Brulatour writes, "Wildness: it is the philosophy ... that enabled Thoreau to outgrow, as Howarth says, 'the airy insubstantiality of [Transcendentalist] aesthetics. He put a solid ground of reality under Emerson's ideals, showed how his metaphysics actually work in the physical world'. Thoreau truly believed Emerson's theory: 'Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.' He devoted his lifetime to close scrutiny of the the natural facts in order to perceive their spiritual message. He saw the American wilderness as the country's 'historic trust, the ultimate challenge to acquisitive drives.'"

The Margaret Brulatour quote above and much information in the annotations is from Hypertext of Walking, Margaret M. Brulatour, copyright 1999. The text is from the 1906 Houghton Mifflin edition, originally adapted to HTML by Bradley Dean, from the Thoreau Home Page website. The Thoreau Reader's Walking is divided into three parts for easier online reading. Quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson are from his biographical essay on Thoreau.

More information on Walking is in the Lecturing section of the Thoreau Home Page.

Search for words in Walking at Concordances of Great Books

Another point of view: For wildness, hope lies in reality, not romanticism - by Chet Raymo

[ 홈 ] [ Introduction ] [ Thoreau's Walden ] [ Maine Woods ] [ Cape Cod ] [ Thoreau's Civil Disobedience ] [ Life Without Principle ] [ Slavery in Massachusetts ] [ A Plea for Captain John Brown ] [ Thoreau's Walking ] [ Thoreau's World ] [ Transcendentalism ]