Post type: Stream of consciousness
How sure am I?: Reasonably sure
I just finished reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking, and I’d be lying if I didn’t describe it as a kind of spiritual experience. The essay is poetic, prophetic, deeply utopian, and philosophical all at once.
I read it over a couple of days. Not just because it’s long, but because it’s dense: packed with meaning and metaphor. In an age where our minds are fed a steady stream of information with zero nutritional value, it takes time, at least for my feeble mind, to digest an essay this fibrous and nutrient-rich. The other reason why the essay spoke to me is because I love walking, but I live in Bangalore, and there are no spaces where you can walk without the ever-present threat of death. This loss has led to an undying yearning in me for a peaceful place where I can just wander aimlessly.
As I finished reading the essay, I had a smile on my face. It was both a happy smile and a wistful one. Happy, because I’m in awe of the beauty, brilliance, and romance of the essay. Sad, because our world today cannot possibly support the lofty ideals it calls us to.
At its heart, Walking is a love story to nature and to humanity’s relationship with it. It is a rousing call for us to reacquaint ourselves with nature and rekindle that connection. But it is also a mirror. It shows us how devoid, characterless, and empty our modern urban lives have become—estranged not only from nature, but also from the wild spirit inside us that ties us to it. This estrangement is the tragedy of modern life, one we rarely even pause to think about, let alone realize.
The sad reality is that by becoming estranged from nature, we’ve also become estranged from our wild selves: the part of us that is jagged, lively, interesting, and vivacious. In its place, we’ve tamed and molded ourselves to fit into the straitjacket of modernity and civilization.
In a world dominated by what Ian McGilchrist calls left-brain thinking (that hemisphere that renders everything cold and dead, like a resource to be exploited), I wonder if Thoreau’s essay can even penetrate the corrosive and suffocating silt that has accumulated over our inner romantic spirit. That part of us which ultimately craves the touch of grass and a kiss of warm sunlight and longs for walks through woods and wild meadows and to saunter in and along lazy streams. In a world where the left hemisphere has become master rather than emissary, will we even allow ourselves to imagine such longings?
For me, the essay also reads as a lament for the loss of contemplative spaces, which I recently wrote about. Spaces where you can simply wander, let your imagination run wild, and allow a million new worlds that exist only in your imagination to come alive teeming with a million stories.
Perhaps the fundamental reason we are so disconnected from our primal roots lies in our explore-exploit mindset instead of an explore-nurture one. We look at everything as a resource to be exploited, extracted, and sold for profit. In doing all of this, we are not nearly investing enough to replenish and restore. This inability of ours to rewild our world manifests in our own inner barren selves.
The essay is also a lament for what we’ve lost. In the name of progress and modernity, we’ve dug into the bowels of the earth, filled the holes with cement, and erected giant boxes and industries with towering smokestacks that spew forth a relentless torrent of toxic breath like evil witches hurling their vile curses skyward.
It’s tempting to read Walking as nothing more than an essay telling us to hug a tree, plant a sapling, or grow some flowers in the garden. But that misses the deep, rich, layered subtext that pervades the work. Thoreau is calling us to recognize that nature is our first home, the wellspring of our deepest vitality.
And he is warning us: if we are alienated from nature, and if we do not respect and protect it, then we risk leaving a deep void at the center of what it means to be human. We will become one-dimensional beings, forever alienated because in alienating ourselves from nature, we become alien to ourselves.
Thoreau’s essay is a reminder that in the name of progress, we are wreaking havoc on the very things that lend meaning to being human. This alienation doesn’t just diminish us as individuals; it also corrodes culture and society. It reshapes the way we conceive of ourselves, our world, and the stories we tell.
Thoreau notes the loss of a certain sense of wildness in the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and others. That observation can be extended to our own times. We’ve traded the wild woods for manicured backyard gardens with white picket fences: an ersatz replica of the real thing.
It would be easy to dismiss Walking as a Luddite, techno-rejectionist essay. But that would be to miss the forest for the trees. At its heart, this is a call for balance and not a rejection of progress. It is a plea to reclaim the nourishing capabilities of nature and a reminder of our fundamental relationship with it.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.
“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact. For my part, 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 mosstrooper. 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. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds him self in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as 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. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up, appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
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 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.
In writing this, I thought of my grandpa, who in many ways was much like Thoreau. He lived in nature and was deeply at one with it. He often used to say, “Where a man walks, even grass doesn’t grow.” I can’t think of a more damning indictment of our fetish for progress at all costs. We seem to have lost all conception of balance and harmony.
To me, Walking is not just a plea to reconnect with nature. It is a warning about the danger of losing an entire part of our being. It is a call to remember that nature is not just scenery: it is our wild counterpart and the source of our richest selves.
The tragedy is, we are all walkers. It’s just that our milieu has smothered that desire in us. The proof for my assertion is simple. Whenever you go to a beach or a forest-like area, you can’t help but feel this irresistible urge to just walk in whatever direction calls to you. It’s a primordial force, like gravity, that pulls at your inner self—the hidden one buried under the debris of modernity that has accumulated in your psyche. In such open places, you hear the call to freedom so loudly that your constructed outer self all but crumbles.
What do we need to do, or what’s needed, to walk in peace?
I don’t have an answer. The very question feels like a pipe dream.
You can read and download Walking by Henry David Thoreau on Gutenberg and Wikisource.
I’ll leave you with this delightful poem by William Wordsworth:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.