Tag: Matthew Anderson

38. Rob Cowen, The North Road

When I read a review of Rob Cowen’s The North Road in The Guardian last winter, I knew I had to read it. A study of a highway? On foot? Yes! Of course I was interested. My first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, covers similar ground (forgive the pun). I immediately ordered a copy, and in July, I finally got down to reading it. I’m happy I did.

The North Road isn’t, as I had imagined, a book about a 400-mile walk following the path of “the North Road,” a historical highway (now the A1 and its variants) which runs from London to Edinburgh and beyond. Cowen isn’t wedded to the idea of walking, although the first half of the book tells the story of a long walk from London to Nottinghamshire, partly alone and partly with a friend, an active-duty soldier, known only as A, who joins Cowen when he is on leave. The rest of the book follows the highway by car. The pandemic is one reason for that change; another is that Cowen journeys at times with very different companion, his mother. That shift in the means of travel didn’t affect my interest in the book (which is a surprise, because I can be rigid about these things), and it becomes the occasion for Cowen’s experiments in genre, which add so much to the book.

Cowen begins with a day spent volunteering at an archaeological site uncovered by an expansion of the A1 in Yorkshire. It’s impossible, he suggests, to dig anywhere in England without uncovering evidence of its history. Roman, neolithic, Bronze Age, modern–it doesn’t matter: bodies, pottery, coins, weapons, the remains of structures (particularly henges) are everywhere. The way people lived, their technologies and burial practices, means they left many traces. That’s true here as well, or at least it was. The areas of native grassland that remain unploughed are full of tipi rings, farmers often collected hundreds of arrow heads and other knapped flint objects, former buffalo jumps were the sites of centuries of bones. The difference, perhaps, is that when the grassland became fields of wheat, the tipi rings and medicine wheels were destroyed, and the bones of the buffalo were shipped away to be turned into china and fertilizer. The arrowheads often end up in boxes in local museums, separated from their context by the plough and their first settler collectors. Similar vandalism happened in England, of course. Victorian archaeologists broke into tombs; many of the stones at Avebury were deliberately shattered by clergymen who believed they were evidence of Satanic worship. But more tangible evidence of the past seems to remain in England, even before those blue medallions began to be installed on any old building where something somewhat interesting took place.

But this book isn’t just about artifacts or material culture. It’s about stories. Like me (and like other walking writers, from Matthew Anderson to Iain Sinclair), Cowen looks for evidence of the past in the pedestrian present, while also learning everything he can about the history and geography of the places he visits. While walking, he keeps an eye out for old coaching inns, since the North Road was, for much of the 18th century, a busy coach route. He tells us when he sees evidence of the road’s earlier Roman incarnation. He tracks the rise and fall of towns and villages as the road was moved or the railway passed (or didn’t pass) them by. But the stories are what make this book come alive: stories about people who grew up or lived or met their endings alongside the North Road, including Margaret Thatcher, the prizefighter Tom Molineaux, the poet John Clare, the murder victim John Barugh. And stories from Cowen’s own life, his struggle to overcome childhood trauma, and stories about his family, who lived in Doncaster (right on the road) before moving down to London. That complex, layered mix of memoir, biography, history, geography, and attention to place, as well as the stories of the difficulties of a long walk, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in such things.

And that leads to Cowen’s shifts in genre, from nonfiction to fiction, where historical evidence is missing or where he wants to get inside those stories. There are two long chapters of fiction here: one about a contemporary (more or less) travelling IT support person, leading a lonely life in hotels and on the motorway, and the other about a woman trying to escape William the Conqueror’s soldiers during the Harrying of the North, a scorched-earth campaign against the Danes and Anglo-Saxons, mostly in Yorkshire, who were rebelling against his rule after the Norman Conquest. To call that campaign “ethnic cleansing” might be anachronistic, but from Cowen’s account, it seems accurate. I don’t know how much his fictional version of events stacks up against the historical record, or if there is much of a historical record of what it was like to be a victim of the Harrying, since a) few of those people could write and b) any documents would’ve been burned along with their homes, but the narrative is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. In that way, The North Road asks us to think about the way fiction and nonfiction blur together, the way that our knowledge is partial, the way that our memories are constructions.

I was amazed by The North Road, and I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s other books (nonfiction and poetry). I’m not tempted, though, to follow in his footsteps and try to walk from London to Doncaster (or wherever he stopped), mostly because I don’t have the courage for that much trespassing and wild camping (walking beside highways in the UK is more than unpleasant–it’s suicidal, since there are no shoulders). I’m glad he did it, though, and delighted that he wrote this book.

36. Matthew R. Anderson, Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul

When I was a boy in Sunday school, I disliked the Apostle Paul. Intensely. His rigid rules, his asceticism, his demand that people live as if their actions might lead others astray–I hated all of that. But I’ve been a fan of Leonard Cohen for decades: his poetry, his fiction, and his music, from his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen to You Want it Darker, which released in 2016 just three weeks before his death. I would never have thought that Paul and Leonard had much in common, aside from being Jewish. In Prophets of Love: The Unlikely Kinship of Leonard Cohen and the Apostle Paul, Matthew R. Anderson argues, convincingly, that despite their many differences, they share many, many things.

First of all, Anderson would tell me that I’ve got Paul all wrong. Only seven of the letters ascribed to him in the New Testament were written by him; the rest are almost certainly not his, according to recent scholarship, including the ones that used to bother me so much. Still, he writes that “after decades of studying, teaching, and researching his life and letters, I know I would almost certainly not get along with Paul in person.” He was volatile, argumentative, rude, passive-aggressive, imperious. Leonard, on the other hand, was charming and seductive. When Anderson listens to his “bleak and magnificent poetry,” he finds himself “startled–sometimes to laughter, sometimes to regret, and most often to an appreciation of the dark, rich, sweetness of love and loss.” (I’m following Anderson’s use of first names, which makes sense, since Paul doesn’t seem to have had a surname.) At the same time, though, Anderson acknowledges, “I might not always have liked everything about Leonard Cohen in person.” Seen through the lenses of gender and power, Leonard’s life and work generate discomfort. The complex response Anderson has to both figures is one of the qualities that links them together for him.

That’s where Prophets of Love begins, but it’s not where it ends. In the first chapter, Anderson lays out the framework of the comparison he intends to make. Both Leonard and Paul were Jews; both were religious, both were writers. Both knew how to persuade others with their words. Both worked hard “to encourage warm identification with their audiences, despite suffering very public moments of relational failure and raw vulnerability.” From here, the book explores these points of similarity: their Jewishness, their fascination with Jesus (although that fascination took different forms for each of them), the way both surrounded themselves with women (although, again, the way they related to women was different for each of them), their asceticism (celibacy for Paul, fasting and the boot-camp life Leonard lived in the Zen Centre at Mount Baldy in Los Angeles), their masculinity, their rhetorical abilities, their senses of divine vocation, their mysticism, their awareness of suffering, the way their work carried on after their deaths. By the end of the book, Leonard and Paul have become nearly interchangeable, despite their differences. For Anderson, “it was precisely because Leonard knew how fleeting success could be, and how fickle humans love, that he could write about divine mercy and diving judgment that speak to us above and beyond history.” At that point, he stops–a pause marked by the beginning of a new paragraph–and asks, “Did I just write that about Leonard? It could have been Paul.”

Prophets of Love is the result of decades of classroom experience; it guides its reader through its comparisons carefully, not making claims it can’t support and qualifying the similarities it finds between Leonard and Paul with recognitions of their differences. Each chapter even ends with homework: songs and writing on which to meditate, additional reading for the ambitious or fascinated. The last chapter even ends with a suggestion about how people teaching Second Temple Judaism to undergraduates could use Leonard’s poem “Song of the Hellenist” to get their students thinking about the experiences of Hellenized Jews in the second century BCE. Throughout the book, I sensed the presence of a warm, friendly teacher helping a skeptical student (me) understand how two very different figures could share so much. I’ll bet Leonard, if he was still with us, would enjoy this book, too.

A Pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral

Matthew drops me off in the parking lot at Pomquet Beach and wishes me a good walk. I stride down the boardwalk towards the water. That boardwalk saves the dune habitat, mostly blueberries and dwarf spruce trees, from being trampled by visitors. At the beach a sign explains that rare piping plovers nest here, and asks people to avoid walking close to the dunes, where the sand is loose and dry, because that disturbs the plovers. Sometimes people accidentally step on their nests. I do as the sign asks and walk close to the water, where the damp sand holds the footsteps of other creatures, human and otherwise. White-throated sparrows are trying to sing “O Canada.” The sun is surprisingly warm, even now, at 7:00 in the morning; the forecast calls for a hot day. I’m wearing a sweater, but not for long.

Before I left for Nova Scotia, I finished Matthew Anderson‘s book Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia (my reflections on that book can be found here). I knew as I read that book that when I came to visit Matthew and his wife, Sara Parks, I would repeat the pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral that is the subject of a good half of the story it tells. Matthew led a group of people on that pilgrimage back in September 2024; they arrived at St. Ninian’s Cathedral in time for the official celebration of the 150th anniversary of its dedication. I won’t be participating in anything so important. I’ll just be spending the day walking the 25 kilometres or so from this beach to Antigonish.

The waves are hitting the sand with a surprising muffled thump. By the water, seaweed–some bright lime green, some a dark rusty brown–has been left behind by the tide. I step around the low piles of smooth stones beside the water. A pale grey plant, like sage, is growing in the dry sand across the beach, where the dunes and the plovers’ nests begin. One of the plovers flies out over the water. Crows in tall, dead spruces watch me, silent. Fragments of lobsters and crabs, dropped by seabirds in order to break open their shells, exposing the meat inside, litter the sand.

Matthew drove me over the route the day before, so that I would know where to turn, but still I miss the path off the beach. The stick someone planted to mark it blends in with all the other sticks. I retrace my steps through the dunes, watching for plovers’ nests and wondering if ticks live here. Everyone in Nova Scotia seems to be concerned about ticks because of the chance of contracting Lyme disease, and rightly so: it’s not a joke if it’s left untreated. Wikipedia tells me that most infections are caused by deer ticks, which aren’t common back home in Saskatchewan; the only ticks I’ve seen are wood ticks. It also notes that a vaccine was developed 20 years ago, but it was discontinued due to a lack of demand. Why would people prefer to worry about ticks and disease when they could get vaccinated instead? I see the path first, then the stick at the beach end. It doesn’t stand out; I can’t blame myself for missing it.

I march down the footpath onto the gravel road behind. Even though my pack is heavy with snacks, water, and rain gear (the forecast also calls for thunderstorms this morning), I feel strong and energized. I also know that this part of the walk–the beach and the road leading inland–will be the quietest, that as I get closer to my destination there will be more traffic, and so I want to enjoy this part. When we were here yesterday, I took a photograph from the window of the car of a great blue heron standing on a rock, but I don’t notice that bird again today. I do see something that resembles a cormorant swimming in the inlet. Maybe that’s the heron? It dives before I can get another picture. A stiff breeze blowing inland keeps me cool, and a yellow warbler is singing. Ferns, dogwoods, serviceberries, and aspens grow next to the road, along with lupins, of course. Those garden escapees are everywhere in Nova Scotia. So are ox-eye daisies, which are ubiquitous everywhere. I pass the road that leads up to Chez Deslauriers, the Acadian cultural centre. Matthew and I dropped by there yesterday. It was closed, but he took a selfie, or an ussie, as Ted Lasso‘s Jamie Tart would say, of the two of us on its porch.

The sky is clouding over, and I’m glad I brought the rain gear along. My mind is racing along, partly with thoughts about writing this blog post, and I wonder to what extent walking can be meditative. I know it can be, but it takes work. I feel my feet on the firm gravel, saying left, right, left, right to help focus my attention. Then I see three pedestrians ahead of me, where I make my next turn, off the gravel road and onto the paved one, and I stop. I hope I can catch up to them; to walk with someone else, however briefly, would be a welcome change from my usual solitary plodding. My mind immediately leaps to Matthew, who seems to have an innate knack for happiness. I’m not like that. I’m someone for whom happiness, as former journalist turned mindfulness podcaster Dan Harris argues, is a skill that must be laboriously learned. Rather late in life, too, at least in my case.

The pedestrians–three women about my age–are chatting with a motorist who has stopped in the middle of the road, and I catch up to them just as the driver says farewell and moves on. I say hello. They are Audrey, Colleen, and Virginia. They talk about people they know, family and friends, and periodically ask me a question about what I’m doing. They’re all from here, although Virginia has lived in Calgary for 40 years. They make the same walk down this road every day, from their homes to the gravel road and back again. They’re surprised that I’m walking to Antigonish. They used to cycle there, years ago, but I get the sense that the roads have gotten busier than they’d like. One warns me about the traffic volume and speed on Taylors Road. They point out a cottontail–“will that be in your blog?” one asks–but I was scribbling in my notebook and miss it. They walk at a quick pace, and when I stop to take a picture or a note, I fall behind. They walk in the traffic lane, too, which has me worrying about their safety, but they walk here all the time, so they must know what they’re doing. I notice a host of blue flag iris in the ditch, dozens of plants, but I’m not close enough to the women to call their attention to those glorious flowers, and even if I were, I don’t feel like interrupting their conversation. I can keep those flowers to myself.

I take off my pack and slide out of my sweater. I hear what seem to be many different birds, but all day long Merlin tells me that the new songs I think I’ve never heard before are coming from song sparrows. They must have dozens of different songs. Maybe they just improvise. One by one, the women say goodbye and walk up their driveways, and I continue into Pomquet alone. I pass some of the landmarks I saw on my walk the other day–the church, the empty museum, the fire department–and turn on Taylors Road. Two chickens, one black and one orange, are finding something to eat on a lawn, while a robin watches them. I’ve been thinking about the situation in the United States–the way undocumented immigrants are being treated by ICE and the way other people are pushing back–and I find the lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” on my phone. I know the tune and the chorus, but not the verses, and I decide to teach it to myself as I walk by singing it:

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane
And all they will call you will be “deportees.”

I think about the instability in the song’s use of pronouns. Sometimes the workers who are being deported are referred to as “they,” especially in the first verse; sometimes as “you,” as in the chorus; but most of the time the singer uses the pronoun “we,” putting himself with them and even claiming that his grandfather was an undocumented fruit picker. Is that true of Woody Guthrie? I don’t know. I used to wonder if he’s indulging in a kind of cultural appropriation in the song, but the range of pronouns suggest something more complex is going on. Maybe the speaker–it could be a persona, after all, rather than Guthrie speaking, or singing, directly to us—is using “we” to assert solidarity with the workers? That makes sense to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct interpretation.

Passing motorists–and there are a lot of them: Taylors Road is busy–must wonder why my mouth is moving, who I think I’m talking to, as I sing and walk at the same time. Or maybe they’re travelling too quickly to notice; the speed limit here is higher than on the road that runs through Pomquet. I detour around a tractor mowing the side of the road, breathing in the smell of cut grass, and pass the École Acadienne de Pomquet, where children are crying out joyfully as they play outside, waiting for their days to begin. It must be the last week of classes. I remember what that felt like for me, the mix of relief and anticipation and also sadness, since I knew I would be alone much of the summer. Other children, and a few adults, are on what must be a walking path on the other side of the road that runs to the school, where there’s also a community centre, and I consider crossing over to walk there, but I would have to wade through tall grass, risking ticks again, and if the path ends or turns, I would end up wading back to the road again, so I decide to stay where I am. I step into the ditch to get a photo of a Canadian flag, and notice the thick, spongy moss and bunchberry growing beneath my feet. I’m singing Canadian songs now–Leonard Cohen, Stan Rogers–songs I learned in Spain after someone told me about a communal dinner where everyone was asked to sing a song from their home country. I realized I didn’t know any Canadian songs–not completely–and used the computer at an albergue to look up lyrics and scribble them in my notebook. I practiced them as I walked along until I had them by heart. As it turned out, nobody ever demanded that I entertain them with a Canadian song, but I still remember them, and they help pass the time on these long, solitary walks.

I arrive at a narrow overpass that crosses the four-lane highway to Halifax. There’s barely room for a pedestrian here, and I cross quickly. Road walking can be dangerous. A bumblebee is working on a roadside lupin, and a bullfrog makes its percussive call in a swamp. I make up a chant that lists some of the trees growing here–spruce, alder, dogwood, maple and birch–and then realize I’ve left out the aspens. An explosion of Pokémon cards litters the shoulder, and I wonder why some kid would’ve thrown their collection out of the car window. Maybe their siblings were responsible. Across the road, a billboard displays what I think is supposed to be an albino elk. Do those animals live in this part of the world? I have no idea. The sideroads here have Scottish names, and I remember reading in Someone Else’s Saint that there’s a transition right about here between the Acadian presence in Pomquet and the Catholic Highland Scots near Antigonish. Both of those settler communities displaced the Mi’kmaq who lived on this land, but Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation is not far from here. The name “Pomquet” is a French corruption of their name, which refers to the bay that stretches inland from the Northumberland Strait. In a way, this walk passes through all three communities on its way to the cathedral in Antigonish, which has become important to them. Matthew talks about that in Someone Else’s Saint, and even though this walk won’t change anything about colonialism here or elsewhere, I can recognize that ongoing history. It seems that everyone I’ve met on this trip has read Daniel Paul’s We Were Not the Savages, which suggests that people here are aware of the brutality of English colonization here. The Mi’kmaq were the primary victims, but so too were the Acadians, who returned here after the 1755 expulsion, and the Highland Scots only ended up in this place because of political and economic imperialism in Scotland. We can’t change the past, of course, but we could make the future different. Easier said than done, I know, in our individual lives, never mind in our collective experience, but still, not impossible.

The sun breaks through the clouds and the heat on the back of my neck is shocking. I’ve been walking for about three hours, and figure I’m about halfway to my destination. Matthew asked me to text him so that he could bring me coffee, and I realize I’ve forgotten to do that. He answers right away; he’ll be with me in 20 minutes. Meanwhile I keep walking. I pass a motel and a gas station, and then I cross the Lower South River on a bridge that has a wide, sand-covered sidewalk. The ditch is filled with blue flag and what I think is marsh marigold, although I can’t tell for sure from the shoulder and am not going to climb down to get a closer look. Matthew pulls up. He has coffee and food: a small omelette, a piece of buttered toast, cookies. I haven’t had a second breakfast like this while walking since I was in Spain, and I realize how hungry I am. He draws me a map to complement the one in the invitation on his blog to people who might’ve wanted to participate in the pilgrimage. He showed me the turns I need to make the day before, but even though there aren’t that many, I’ve still jumbled them together in my mind, and the map ought to help. When I finish eating, we say goodbye and I continue walking.

Despite the map, though, I miss the turn into Antigonish, mostly because I’m replying to an email on my phone instead of paying attention to where I am. By the time I realize, with the help of Google Maps, where I’ve gone wrong, I end up having to walk back almost a kilometre to the place I should’ve gone right. I resolve to focus on what I’m doing. Now I’m on the road that leads into Antigonish. It’s a long plod on an uneven shoulder. An osprey flies overhead. Finally I see the sidewalk the map indicates on the other side of the road. I’m looking at the tall trees across the road. A goldfinch flies into traffic, and a dead blue jay, obviously hit by a vehicle, lies next to the sidewalk. A sign asks people to slow down because young foxes are in the area, but I don’t see any. I realize I’ve missed another turn. My wayfinding skills must be terrible, or else I’m looking at everything but the map and the intersections. Missing that turn means, I think, that I’m going to miss another one that takes me through a park almost all the way to St. Ninian’s Cathedral. That’s okay, I tell myself. The sidewalk running along this busy street will be noisier, but I’m in the town now, and I should be able to find my way to the cathedral without much trouble.

I cross a bridge over the North River and reach Main Street, where the signs are bilingual: English and Gaelic. I can see the hospital to the right, and I know from yesterday’s recon that it’s at the opposite end of town from the campus of St. Francis Xavier’s University, where the cathedral is located, so I turn left. I walk through the centre of town. It’s not as pretty as Lunenburg, but it also doesn’t feel like the set of a Hallmark movie, so I like it better. I’ll have to cross the river again to get to the cathedral, and I see a bridge on College Street. St. Ninian’s Street is just past it. And there’s the cathedral: a tall stone building with two spires. I thought I might’ve been able to see those spires earlier, but they’re not as tall as I’d thought.

I make a pit stop in the building named after Brian Mulroney–I’d rather use the facilities there than the ones at the cathedral; that feels more respectful–and then I walk back down the hill and enter St. Ninian’s. Inside, it’s bright and quiet, except for the lawnmower running outside. As Matthew’s book points out, there’s some controversy about whether there actually was a St. Ninian at all. He’s reputed to have brought Christianity to the Scots, but there’s some evidence it was there before he’s thought to have arrived. History can be odd that way. Stories change and get lost, names get confused, and where documentation is incomplete, we end up deciding what version we’re going to believe. It’s enough for me that the people who built this imposing structure thought St. Ninian was real. The priest isn’t around, so I can’t ask what he thinks about that question. I’m sure he must have an opinion.

I sit quietly in a pew towards the back, resting. My phone tells me I’ve walked 27 kilometres, which makes sense. Matthew said the journey was about 25 kilometres, and missing that turn made it a little longer. I feel a telltale tickling on my calf. Sure enough, a wood tick is making its way up my leg. I don’t want to leave it alive in the cathedral–someone will walk out of the next service with a tick latched onto their body–so I kill it. At least, I try to: my first attempts are not successful. I could try to drown him, but the only water around is the holy water, and I’m sure disposing of it there would be considered sacrilegious, but I don’t feel like carrying it uphill to the Mulroney building’s washroom. I leave it in the aisle. It looks dead, but it might be pretending. Slowly, I walk back to Main Street and the Syrian shawarma takeout place, Grape Leaves, where I’m going to have lunch. Matthew joins me there. We eat in a nearby park. I recommend their lemon-mint drink, which is perfect on a hot day.

The other day, Sara called Matthew and me “walking nerds,” which is a fair description. My goal with this walk, and with this blog post, is to encourage other walking nerds to consider making the pilgrimage from Pomquet Beach to St. Ninian’s Cathedral on foot–especially those who have read Someone Else’s Saint. It’s not that long, as long walks go, and there’s something pleasing about turning a written account of a journey into a physical experience. Now I know what the pilgrimage Matthew writes about was like. Or might’ve been like, since walking alone is not the same as walking with other people. Or maybe people will read Someone Else’s Saint and be satisfied with Matthew’s accounts of the two walks he relates, without feeling compelled to re-enact them. That would make sense, too. For most of us, that would make a lot more sense than trudging along the side of the road on a hot day.

87. Henry David Thoreau, Walking

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There are many passages from Henry David Thoreau’s lecture Walking, published after his death in 1862, that show up in any survey of writing about walking. But there is a lot more going in in Thoreau’s text than those frequently quoted statements. Rather than being focused on walking, most of the text addresses another topic entirely: wildness. For Thoreau, the two go together: walking is a vehicle for experiencing wildness, by which he means, the natural world, or life beyond human society. In fact, the lecture begins with a short paragraph in which Thoreau states, “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” (35). The “extreme statement” (35) he intends to make begins with the idea that humans are natural rather than social or cultural. It doesn’t matter that such an idea is impossible; what’s important is Thoreau’s intention and, I think, the way it reflects his own love of the natural world and of solitude.

From that point Thoreau moves to one of those often-quoted passages, an attempt at an etymology of the word “sauntering.” He makes two suggestions. One is that “saunter” comes from medieval pilgrimages (pretended, according to Thoreau) to the Holy Land, from the idea that children would exclaim “There goes a Sainte-Terrer” when such people walked past. Strangely, Thoreau shifts to the present tense when he evaluates these pilgrimages: “They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean” (35-36). I find the syntax of that sentence very strange, and I have a suspicion that Thoreau might prefer the “idlers and vagabonds” to those who would actually be walking to the Holy Land—or that he’s less interested in the notion of a religious pilgrimage than in one that leads into the woods, which is the site Thoreau really finds to be sacred. That’s the derivation he prefers, because “every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels” (36). By “this Holy Land” Thoreau means Massachusetts, or Concord: the place he called home. And by “Infidels,” I am assuming he means those who do not or cannot appreciate the natural world of that place; that, in any case, is an opposition he develops through the lecture.

However, Thoreau also acknowledges that some people derive “saunter” from “sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere” (36). This, he claims, “is the secret of successful sauntering”: “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea” (36). This derivation, although Thoreau prefers the first, has the benefits of lending itself to a metaphor taken from nature, and of distinguishing those who walk, or saunter, from those who stay at home, and who, despite their stationary quality, “may be the biggest vagrant of all.”

The first derivation, though, allows Thoreau to make this apparent self-criticism, although I think it’s actually an ironic critique of his audience, and his culture:

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. (36)

Thoreau wants to raise the stakes, as dramaturges say; he wants walkers to take risks and walks to mean something. But at the same time, the exaggeration here (“embalmed hearts”?) might suggest he’s not entirely serious. Such hyperbole continues through the first pages of the lecture, including this passage, which Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner describe as an example of “nineteenth-century chauvinism” (226): “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk” (36). The joke is on the reader, of course; Thoreau never married, lived alone, and had few if any domestic entanglements. He is asking his audience to do something he wouldn’t have to do and likely wouldn’t be able to imagine. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his biographical sketch of Thoreau, he was “the bachelor of thought and Nature” (9).

The self-conscious drama of the notion that one must treat any walk as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, an experience likely to lead to one’s death, is (to me) sheer hyperbole, and the language in the following paragraphs supports that claim. Thoreau describes the pleasure he and his walking companion take 

in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order,—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but the Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People. (37)

Is Thoreau serious here? I don’t think so, although I could be wrong. Elsewhere in the essay he criticizes any interest in what are, for him, outmoded or inappropriate European ideas and idioms, and so his use of them here might suggest exaggeration. I keep thinking that he’s giving a lecture, that he has to engage his audience and interest them not only in what he wants to say, but in himself as a speaker. What better way to accomplish those goals than to begin by making oneself something of a figure of fun who is in on the joke?

At the same time, there is a serious side to the distinction he has been making, subtly, between those who walk and those who stay home:

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, mo[s]t of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of Walkers. (37)

Again there is deliberate exaggeration here, but I think Thoreau is making a point. After all, his lack of domestic obligations; his self-imposed poverty; his friends and family, who supported his life and work (by paying his tax bills, for example); all of the factors of his life allowed him to spend hours every day going for long walks. Others, who had to work long hours as farmers or clerks, did not have that freedom.

Still, in this paragraph the butt of the Thoreau’s humour shifts from Thoreau himself to those who lack the leisure or disposition to walk:

Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws. (37)

The short period of the remembered walk (just half an hour), and the decision to “confine themselves to the highway” afterwards, and the allusion to Robin Hood, all suggest (to me) that Thoreau is having a bit of a laugh at his audience’s expense. After all, they are likely to be the kind of people who have to work and lack the leisure to wander around. They bought tickets to the lecture, after all.

Thoreau, in fact, acknowledges that he is both unusual and lucky in his need to walk and in his ability to do it:

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least,—and it is commonly more than that,—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. (38)

Thoreau’s freedom to walk is also a necessity, and although it has led to poverty (for him there’s no difference between a penny and a thousand pounds, because he has neither), it has also helped him to preserve his “health and spirits.” In fact, he cannot understand how others, with jobs and obligations, manage to survive. He wonders why “there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street” every afternoon between four and five o’clock, a blast that would scatter “a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing,” and thus cure the evil of being confined “to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together” (39). Thoreau’s wonder is not confined to men working outside of the home: “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know,” he writes, but he suspects “that most of them do not stand it at all” (39). He remembers walking past houses on summer afternoons, houses whose occupants appear to be sleeping (39). He seems to be suggesting that they aren’t sleeping at all; perhaps they have gone out for a walk. It’s hard to say, though, what Thoreau means here, because he ends that paragraph with a paean to the architecture that doesn’t go to sleep itself, but which stands guard over the slumberers (40). The notion seems strange. What is more likely: sleeping or walking? Shouldn’t those women be walking? If they are sleeping, what does that say about Thoreau’s views on women?

Thoreau suggests that the walking he is describing has nothing to do with “taking exercise,” but “is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life” (40). Moreover, when one walks, one must think—ruminate—as Wordsworth, who famously wrote while walking, did (40). Being outside so much “will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character,” he admits, but the “natural remedy” for that roughness “is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience”:

There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience. (41)

In other words, that “certain roughness of character,” far from being a vice, is a virtue. Given the choice between that roughness and “mere sentimentality,” Thoreau will choose roughness. I wonder if the figure who lies in bed during the day is a return to the female inhabitants of those silent houses whose occupants seem to be asleep; perhaps those women are actually sleeping, rather than walking, a suggestion which would support accusations of chauvinism.

As Heddon and Turner point out, Thoreau critiques domestic walking: “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?” (41). I don’t think it’s the domestic that Thoreau is rejecting as much as it is the notion of wild nature that he is advocating (although they necessarily go together). It’s not enough to walk in the woods, either; one must want to walk there, and one must be focused on the experience rather than thinking of other things:

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works,—for this may sometimes happen. (42)

For Thoreau, walking is an experience of attention and flow—of being, in two ways, returned to his senses: to the sensory experience of the world, and to his right mind. The reason he rejects society and its obligations, here and elsewhere in the lecture, is that he seems to require that specific kind of walking experience, and even when he is thinking about “good works,” he is not present in his surroundings.

“My vicinity affords many good walks,” Thoreau continues, “and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not exhausted them” (42). One might expect that Thoreau is interested in walking as an experience of place, in Yi-Fu Tuan’s sense of place as a location that one knows through experience, and he does, but he’s also interested in walking as an experience of space, of novelty and freshness:

An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this on any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of a human life. It will never become quite familiar to you. (42)

That experience of space, as Thoreau’s Dahomey simile suggests, is related to processes of colonialism and empire, and yet, there is also something strangely local and perhaps almost domestic in the suggestion that seeing a previously unnoticed farmhouse is “as good as” African exploration. There is a sense here that Thoreau’s neighbourhood is so rich that he will never finish discovering new things in it—although, as Emerson suggests in his biographical sketch, those new things are more likely to be plants or birds than farmhouses (22-25). 

Indeed, Thoreau suggests his movements during a walk are like those of “the fox and the mink”: he moves “first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side,” through a territory without human inhabitants. The animal imagery in this paragraph is applied to other aspects of “civilization and the abodes of man” as a way of minimizing their impact on the land: 

The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. (43)

That what must have been a densely populated part of the United States could afford so much space without signs of human activity is a wonder, and perhaps Thoreau is exaggerating his experience. 

Or perhaps Thoreau sees few signs of human activity because he avoids travelling on roads:

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. (44)

He is clearly one of those who “walk across lots,” and of no use to the “landscape-painter” who “uses the figures of men to mark a road”; that artist would not be able to use Thoreau’s figure because he is elsewhere (44). Walking “across lots” is a way to “walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in” (44). That territory is not America, nor was it discovered by Columbus: “There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen” (45). The only roads Thoreau likes are those that “are nearly discontinued,” and he includes a poem about one of those, “The Old Marlborough Road,” in his text. 

Thoreau notes that most of the land in his vicinity is not private property, and so “the walker enjoys comparative freedom” (47). However, he imagines a very different future:

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. (47-48)

Those days, as Ken Ilgunas and Matthew Anderson have pointed out, have arrived all over North America.

At this point, Thoreau begins shifting away from thinking about walking to thinking about nature, which for him primarily exists in the west—an expression of an American frontier thesis, I think, although he also makes arguments rooted in mythology (the importance of the setting sun) to defend his preference for that direction. The west is the direction of “the wilderness,” and he suggests that when he leaves the city, he is “withdrawing into the wilderness” (50). That is the American tendency, he suggests: “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress[es] from east to west” (50). Here he rejects history and “the old World and its institutions” (51) in preference to the west, the territory of the sun, “the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow” (52). Others who “felt the westward tendency” include Columbus and the “man of the Old World” who travelled from Asia into Europe, with “[e]ach of his steps . . . marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development,” until he crosses the Atlantic Ocean and resumes his westward movement (52-53). He suggests that the climate in the United States may enable “man [to] grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically” under its influences—that, in fact, the North American landscape will create a new kind of human:

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. (55-56)

I was surprised to read such an evocation to American exceptionalism in Thoreau, given that he refused to pay taxes in part because they supported a state that allowed human slavery, but he was of his time, as we all are, and he had a lecture audience to please.

There’s another reason for this apotheosis of the west in Thoreau’s discourse: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (57). “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” he writes (58). He notes that according to “[t]he African hunter Cummings” the skin of the eland “emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass,” and he would like “every man” to be “so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts” (58-59). That odour would be preferable to “that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments,” which is a smell “of dusty merchant’s exchanges and libraries” (59). “Life consists with wildness,” he contends. “The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. . . . Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps”—the wildest place, it seems, that Thoreau can imagine (60). “Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness!” he exclaims (61)—places, like the swamp, that are dreary (because they are frightening to civilized humans, or because they don’t conform to codes of visual beauty). And yet, the American economy depends on agriculture, which requires draining swamps (63-64). “The weapons with which he have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance,” he argues, “but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field” (64). 

“In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us,” Thoreau continues, suggesting that “it is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and the “Iliad,’ in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us,” in the way that a wild duck “is more swift and beautiful than the tame” (64). He wonders where “the literature which gives expression to Nature” is (65):

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,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature. (65-66)

Strangely, though, this evocation of “the literature which gives expression to Nature” is premised on figures of human domination of nature, particularly through agriculture. Would that literature necessarily be a hybrid between the human and the natural? In any case, it doesn’t exist: 

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. (66)

The literature that comes closest seems to be Greek mythology, “the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated” (66).

“In short,” Thoreau continues, “all good things are wild and free”:

There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. (67-68)

The influence of Rousseau on Thoreau is obvious here. “Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization,” he writes, and just because some can be tamed, “this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level” (69). Nature, he writes, is “this vast, savage, howling mother of ours,” and she possesses “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 exclusively an interaction of man on man” (71). It would be better, he continues, that “every man nor every part of a man” should be “cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated”: the greater part of the earth should remain “meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports” (72). 

Thoreau then critiques the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, suggesting that a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance or “what we will call Beautiful Ignorance” would be more useful “in a higher sense,” because what is called knowledge is “often our positive ignorance, ignorance in our negative knowledge” (73). “A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly,” he argues. “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?” (74). That question suggests that Thoreau was a pioneer in the study of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant,” Thoreau continues—a strange thing for someone interested in walking to say, it seems to me. “The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence,” he writes:

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. (74)

The insistence on “sudden revelation” and on something beyond knowledge suggests something about Thoreau’s Romantic predisposition, I think.

Thoreau suggests that “almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society,” but “few are attracted strongly to Nature” (76). For that reason, he considers most men “lower than the animals,” because they are incapable of appreciating “the beauty of the landscape” (76). “For my part,” he continues,

I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. (76)

At this point, he suddenly returns, in the middle of the paragraph, to walking:

The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as if it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. (77)

What is that other land? Where did the reality described in the property deeds he refers to go? He gives an example:

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious, to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,—as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding that I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,—as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed. (78)

Why does Thoreau imagine that the forest is the home of this family? Is that family a metaphor for the ecosystem of Spaulding’s farm? Or is he recording some mystical vision experienced while walking there? I don’t know. He states that he finds it hard to remember that family: “They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself” (78). Regardless, he concludes that “[i]f it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord” (78). Perhaps that family is a way of giving shape to the thoughts he has while walking. He suggests that “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 breed on” (79).

“We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more” (79). Those words lead into a literal description of climbing a tall white pine, which leads Thoreau to “discover new mountains on the horizon” which he had never seen before (79). At the top of the tree, he saw “the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward,” which he picked and took to show the villagers (80). “[N]ot one had ever seen the like before,” he writes, “but they wondered as at a star dropped down” (80). The moral of this fable seems to be the importance of attending to the natural world, but even more, the importance of allowing ourselves, or our imaginations, to soar.

“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present,” Thoreau writes. The past is without interest. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated,” he continues, suggesting again the importance of attending to what is around us. That rooster’s philosophy, Thoreau states, “comes down to a more recent time than ours,” because he rises early and is “in the foremost rank of time” (80-81). The rooster’s crow “is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are past. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?” (81). So many things are combined in this description—Peter’s betrayal of Christ, the controversy over fugitive slave laws (with which Thoreau was concerned), “a new fountain of the Muses,” and I find it hard to understand how paying attention to the present moment brings all of them together. But “[t]he merit of this bird’s strain”—and, remember, he is still talking about attending to the present—“is in its freedom from plaintiveness,” its “pure morning joy” (81). When Thoreau hears a rooster crow, he states, “I think to myself, ‘There is one of us well, at any rate,’—and with a sudden gush return to my senses” (81). 

The next paragraph provides an example of attending to the senses while walking, and that example becomes what can only be described as an epiphany:

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. (81-82)

This is an experience of paradoxes: warm air on a cold day, a sunrise at sunset, a slumbering meadow (it’s November, after all, and winter is quickly approaching) becoming “a paradise.” More importantly, Thoreau continues, “[w]hen we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever on an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still” (82). How can that be? How can such a singular event be infinite? It seems impossible, but Thoreau is certain that it’s the case, even though it is, for him, clearly a special and unique experience: 

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. (82)

This is the approach to the Holy Land, he suggests, returning to the place where he began:

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn. (82)

Enlightenment is possible, it seems, if we walk long enough, and far enough, and it will take the form of the “great awakening light” of the sun.

Thoreau’s optimism at the end of the lecture is something of a surprise, given the discouragement he sometimes expresses, but it’s clear that for him walking is more than a way to experience nature—it is a path towards some kind of enlightenment. I was also surprised by the lecture’s circularity, but the way it circles back to the etymologies with which it began. In a way, I think the key to Walking is Thoreau’s brief introduction, where he suggests that he’s not interested in humans as social creatures, but as “part and parcel of Nature” (35). If that’s his starting point, then it’s not surprising that our enlightenment will be natural, experienced by walking in the sunshine. And if that’s his starting point, criticizing him for (jokingly, I suspect) suggesting that walkers need to abandon their friends and families misses the point. For Thoreau, those social and familial ties are unimportant; what is important is one’s experience of nature. He might well be wrong about that—and I think he is—but that suggestion is consistent with the rest of his argument. In the end, Thoreau was what he was–a nineteenth-century Romantic–and we can only take what we can from this odd text.

Works Cited

Anderson, Matthew Robert. “Why Canadians Need the ‘Right to Roam.’” The Conversation, 29 July 2018, https://theconversation.com/why-canadians-need-the-right-to-roam-100497.

Heddon, Deirdre, and Cathy Turner. “Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 224-36.

Ilgunas, Ken. This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Get It Back, Plume, 2018.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walking, 1863, Watchmaker 2010.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, 1977.