A black and white image of a nature walking book.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau 1851

During this month of reading about walking, I decided to re-read Thoreau’s classic essay on the topic.  When I sat down to write this review, I discovered that I had read and reviewed this essay twice before, in 2016 and again only 9 months ago.  Those reviews, one of which I’ve attached below had captured most of my observations on this, my third reading, but once again, I was impressed that a re-reading has the potential of discovering new elements in a familiar work.

In this re-reading, I was impressed by how closely Thoreau’s transcendental philosophy mirrored today’s Buddhist mindfulness teachings.  Thoreau urges his reader to not dwell in the past with the remonstration that ‘Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.” Once you work through the double negative, it is clear that, like mindfulness, Thoreau is urging the reader to forget regrets and limit worry, to recognize that the past is gone and the future is so deeply contingent that it is futile to spend time worrying about it. This presentness, this being fully awake and in touch with the present moment, is central to Buddhism and clearly to Thoreau as well.

Another parallel which even uses the same words is the emphasis on the ‘beginner’s mind’ that is urged by the Buddhist teacher, Shuryu Suzuki in his book, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”.  Thoreau writes ‘A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful….My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.”  Thoreau goes on to write about the ‘advantage of our actual ignorance.‘

Finally, Thoreau urges that the walker ‘get there in spirit…to forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society…to shake off the village.’  He asks the question: “What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”  This is an almost perfect restatement of the mindfulness direction to clear the mind and to not be distracted by random thoughts, regrets, worries.

It is perhaps no coincidence that while I was reading Thoreau I was also reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, “You Are Here”, one of his many works on mindfulness.  Hanh and Thoreau would have enjoyed each other’s company—-the Vietnamese, Buddhist monk who has done so much to bring mindfulness practice to modern readers and the transcendental philosopher who felt that wildness was the preservation of the world and urged his readers to leave their desks, store counters, and commercial pursuits to lose themselves in Nature.  Wise men, separated by nearly 200  years but sharing a common view of the good.

The second new impression I had upon re-reading this essay  was the beauty of the etchings by Thomas Nason.  Beginning with the beautiful scene of a bridge crossing a mountain stream in the forest and continuing throughout the volume, Nason’s engravings are quite wonderful and vividly evoked for me the Vermont countryside with its rolling hills, streams, and forests were I do my walking.  The prints are all from the collection of the Boston Public Library which has an extensive holdings in Nason’s work.  The artist was born in 1889 and died in 1971 and spent his adult life making prints of his native New England scenery.  His work is held at the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art in DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney, and other prominent museums, and it contributes wonderfully to this simple paperback volume published by Beacon.

Here, then, is my more recent review of Walking from 2023:

Walking by Henry David Thoreau 1862

Thoreau’s classic essay on walking, published posthumously in 1862, was originally delivered as lectures over the 11 years before Thoreau’s death.

It begins by exploring the derivation  of the word ‘saunter’ which Thoreau preferred to ‘walking’ since it carries more of the sense of moving without a specific goal.  The derivation is from either sainte terrae,  the Holy Land where the faithful walked in pilgrimage, or sans terre, a man walking because he is without a land.

Thoreau, in prose that is often quite lofty and complex, urges his fellow man to get out of the store, the office, the factory and walk and enjoy the sky, the air, the land, and the scenery.  ‘In wildness is the preservation of the world’ is one of his most famous lines, and he applies it to the still unsettled areas of New England and most emphatically the West.  He sounds like an American exceptionalist as he contrasts the new, America’s wilderness and wildness, with the old, settled, urban culture and life of Europe.  He also presages Jared Diamond’s thesis of how societies disintegrate when they lose their forests, fields, soil, and water.  He praises “useful ignorance’ over ‘useful knowledge’ urging man to pursue the new and unknown rather than the familiar.  He also presages today’s mindfulness and meditation as he urges living in the present moment and leaving the daily cares of commerce and politics behind as one walks.

Thoreau lived his philosophy walking 3-4 hours a day and often more.  He didn’t need to travel to Cape Cod, Mt. Wachusetts, or the other places which Ben Shattuck revisited.  He could walk out his front door in Concord, MA and  never repeat a walk within a radius of ten miles.  He found areas in his neighborhood where “in one half hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand for one year’s end to another, and where consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of man.”

All in all, this brief essay packed with wisdom and anticipation of many of today’s major thought trends in environmentalism is a fine addition to the bookshelf of ‘walking books’.  It has also been an important influence on nature writing in the 150 years since Thoreau.  In his introduction to this fine Beacon Press edition, John Elder writes that Thoreau was an important precursor for nature writers like Annie Dillard, Robert Finch, and Peter Mathiessen and others. Not bad for a Harvard grad who failed in his work as a pencil manufacturer and a surveyor.

Walking Artist by Hamish Fulton (#3217)A person walking across the water in front of mountains.A book cover with the title of darkness visible.Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (#3219)