Comments on: A Saunter With Thoreau, Walker Errant

By: Jason Peters

Jason Peters — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:58:24 +0000

yogajoe: I regret that my ignorance extends even to this, though if I find anything I’ll post another reply here. –jp

By: yogajoe

yogajoe — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:21:47 +0000

Can you help me locate the conversation between Thoreau and either Wordsworth or Emerson regarding their two opposing viewpoints as to whether is best to leave nature alone to grow in its wildness (Thoreau) or whether what we are to do is to actively cultivate improvement?

By: Shelley Burbank

Shelley Burbank — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:19:19 +0000

Sunday morning: coffee, leaves turning color outside the windows, and this charming essay. Thanks for posting it.

By: Empedocles

Empedocles — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:24:55 +0000

My favorite passage from Thoreau from “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers”:
Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at Lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the shad on account of the warmth of the water. Still patiently almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has left them free for thee to enter. By countless shoals loitering uncertain meanwhile, merely stemming the tide there, in danger from sea foes in spite of thy bright armor, awaiting new instructions, until the sands, until the water itself, tell thee if it be so or not. Thus by whole migrating nations, full of instinct, which is thy faith, in this backward spring, turned adrift, and perchance knowest not where men do not dwell, where there are not factories in these days. Armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere Shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause, with tender dumb mouth only forward, and scales easy to be detached. I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow bar against that Billerica dam? Not despairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies. Willing to be decimated for man’s behoof after the spawning season. Away with the superficial and selfish phil-anthropy of men, who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow creature who alone can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. Thou shalt ere long have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. If it were not so, but thou wert to be overlooked at first, and at last, then would not I take their heaven. Yes, I say so, who think I know better than thou canst. Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayest meet.

By: Rob G

Rob G — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:27:08 +0000

A brief but enjoyable and inspiring “walking” book is ‘Days Afield on Staten Island’ by Wm. T. Davis, written in the 1890′s. Davis had a keen eye for nature, and obviously had a heart for it as well.

By: Katherine Dalton

Katherine Dalton — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:03:32 +0000

I believe I am right in saying that when Thoreau walked Cape Cod, it was nearly denuded of trees. That’s hard to visualize now, when even with all the summer homes it is covered with scrub oak. But in the east in many places he would have seen wildness cut down to the bone, and felt the long march of cross-continent logging coming.

He was indeed a scold, and he was sometimes wrong. I always wince at the line in Walden, where he observes that he returned the ax he borrowed to build the cabin “sharper than I was given it” (I quote imperfectly from memory). Nothing like having a favor immortalized in that way, but then prophets are seldom read in their own Concords, so perhaps that barb never hit.

But he was everything else you say too, and it is a sign of perfect style, that a piece written a century and a half ago sounds modern in its clarity. Lesser stylists from the 19th (oh, say James Fenimore Cooper, whom I like very well) sound so much more antique and creaky in comparison. If you are unpacking his style for your students, Jason, that’s an exercise well worth doing.

By: Bob Cheeks

Bob Cheeks — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:25:34 +0000

It is best to “walk” holy ground.
I once walked from the summit of Little Round Top to Devil’s Den, with my hat removed in respect for the dead who in silence watched.
I always have to take a box of kleenex when I visit Gettysburg.

By: Hudson

Hudson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:50:40 +0000

Excellent piece.

Much of what I know I have learned from walking. On separate outings, I have walked the length of Manhattan from The Cloisters to South Street Seaport. I have walked from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Coney Island, in one outing. When the Northeast lost power on August 14, 2003, I was stranded in Lower Manhattan. I joined the tens of thousands of persons walking from Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge, in the evening, to their Brooklyn destinations. The bridge was jam-packed with humanity from side-to-side and end-to-end. I could feel the bridge swaying under the weight.

I did not stop or even pause to drink from my water bottle once on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, but kept going, walking uphill toward Park Slope. The way was strewn with water bottles, trash and tired people. I wanted to get there before dark. I didn’t achieve that goal. I did arrive in the Slope without destroying my feet. I always wear good walking shoes. There, on familiar ground, I sat down at a restaurant and ate a simple meal cooked outside on a grill by flashlights. The stars were out that night; I remember that. I made a call by match light on a pay phone to a friend in Sheepshead Bay, near where I lived in South Brooklyn. I would not have to sleep outside on someone’s porch or back yard, after all. My friend was home and drove to pick me up. I was thankful for that, because it was just too damn far for me to walk at age 57, at night, especially considering foot injuries I had suffered not long before that time.

I have often enjoyed the bucolic stroll. In fact, I once tramped around Walden Pond.

By: D.W. Sabin

D.W. Sabin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:16:09 +0000

Wow Peters….a great piece here. Thoreau understood that nature was simultaneously infinite and finite, a sweeping tableau and a detailed snippet….all melding into a sum where the whole is not greater than the parts because who is to say where parts end and whole begins? This , of course ran straight up against the statistical convictions of man….the actuarial, soberly improving his surroundings in rows and triplicate. Thoreau saw both the simplicity and the complexity of the world around him and one of the failings of our era is that our approach to science and nature is all to frequently in the actuarial direction of complexity.

If he was indeed a scold,…and there is no end of things to merit a scold…. what a warm embrace of a scolding he left us. The real message to me in his simple accounting of the expenses involved in the erection of his shack on Walden Pond is not so much that our man-made world is superfluous and that we should be more economical in how we live but that nature….that thing we are neither apart nor distinct from….is something so rich that any effort we make to “improve” it is best made either in the spirit of economy or if we are up to the task, in a manner that returns the compliment. Finding a land at first “kind”, we have made a career of westering over it and putting as much distance between “it” and “us” as we can. Your last sentence is a proper guidebook to reducing the distances we have created.