Walking
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WALKING
by Henry David Thoreau
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. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make
an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of
that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a
genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived
“from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy
Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a
Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. 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. Some,
however, would derive the word 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. For this 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. But I prefer the
first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For 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.
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. 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.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes
have a companion, take pleasure 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 Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of
Church and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art;
though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be
received, most 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 the Walkers.
Ambulator nascitur, non fit. 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.
“When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.”
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.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some
rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh
hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day,
when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the
daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I
confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing
of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to
shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years
almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of—sitting
there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock
in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning
courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully
at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have
known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound
by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say
between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning
papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general
explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of
antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an
airing—and so the evil cure itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand
it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not
stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking
the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste
past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such
an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about
these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I
appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never
turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the
slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the
evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before
sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours—as
the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and
adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the
springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health,
when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast
which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant
to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but
his study is out of doors.”
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over
some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands,
or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy
of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a
softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an
increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more
susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral
growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and
no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin
skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that
the natural remedy 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.
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? Even some sects
of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to
themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and
walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos
open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the
woods, if they do not carry us thither. 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.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have
not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,
and I can still get this 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 human life. It will never become quite
familiar to you.
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. A people
who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw
the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie,
and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while
heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels
going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of
paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy
Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without