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Walking by Henry David Thoreau [review short]

A short ramble of a book. Thoreau's thoughts come and go, tangents form and disappear, just as your own thoughts amble and wander while walking. In fact, Walking makes you want to go for a walk, and during it good ideas will come to you if you let them.[*] 

Thoreau struggled with modernity even back in 1860s-era Massachusetts. It's the same struggle. There's too much work/spend cycle, too much consumerism, too much development, not enough nature, not enough peace and quiet. But when Thoreau writes "I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant" you can't help but think mournfully about the sheer density, traffic, overdevelopment and all the other problems of modernity in Massachusetts today. "Civilization" continues to domesticate us, gnawing away at our spirits and our souls.

[*] Nietzsche put it much more forcefully: "Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors." I stumbled onto this wonderful quote in Bronze Age Mindset, a book of genuine samizdat literature I'll review shortly.

Notes:
* Etymology of the word sauntering, starting from people in France begging for funds "to go to Sainte-Terre" (the Holy Land) such that children would say "there goes a Sainte-Terrer" which evolved into a saunterer, a Holy-Lander. Likely one of those etymologies that probably isn't true but really feels like it should be. 

* "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..." 

* "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.'"

* You can't help but get mournful about the immense amount of open space in 1862 Massachusetts compared to now. "I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant."

* See Thoreau's poem (and not a bad one!) "The Old Marlborough Road"

* For whatever reason he always seems to walk southwest, he doesn't know why, "Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free." It sounds like a metaphor for the United States on some level as we chase freedom by moving west. "I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west."

* Thoreau on the all-too-temporary idea of American liberty, an increasingly fictional idea even in 1862: "Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology."

* I can't stand the word "methinks"--unfortunately Thoreau uses it every few pages. 

* Interesting epistemological musings here: on how "a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory" but then this declarative knowledge is like eating hay in a barn, it's not the real knowledge of being out in nature eating grass in the fields. He is scratching at the idea of distinguishing between trying to know something through mental concepts and verbal representations ("...a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before") versus knowing something through direct experience: See also this quote: "A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful--while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. 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?" 

* A cute little anecdote here where Thoreaus climbs a tall white pine for the first time (and "got well pitched"), discovers "a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine" at the very top of the tree, and brings them into town to show off to total strangers: "not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down." Kind of hilarious if you think about it realistically: Thoreau, a kook woodsman known for living in a shack by the pond, wanders into town showing everybody some little flowers that he picked? You can't help but chuckle happily at this scenelet.

Vocab: 
Vespertinal: active in the evening; "vespertine flowers"
Ferity: being feral; the state of being wild or uncultivated; savagery; ferocity
Embayed: formed into bays; hollowed out by the sea; "an embayed coastline"
Musquash: archaic term for muskrat

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