Henry David Thoreau’s Walking: Ecological Philosophy

Textual Genesis and Posthumous Publication of Thoreau's Naturalist Essay. If "Civil Disobedience" stands as the most influential of Henry David Thoreau’s writings in altering governmental structures and power dynamics, his 1851 work "Walking" provided the defining conceptual rally cry for modern ecology and environmental conservation: "In Wildness is the preservation of the world" (239). Though initially surprising in discussions of Thoreau's radical political essays, "Walking" operates as an ideological companion piece to Walden. Within its structure, terms such as Wildness and Westering serve as expansive metaphors aligning directly with the philosophical stances celebrated across his concurrent political writings.

While Thoreau's advocate posture toward natural preservation featured prominently throughout his private journals from the 1840s onward, "Walking" anticipated the intense socio-political critiques of his final years regarding John Brown. Literary scholars Walter Harding and Michael Meyer characterize the text as "the least organized of his shorter works," attributable to its hybrid composition. Portion of the material originated from journal entries compiled for lectures delivered in 1851–1852 under the heading "The Wild," while distinct lectures titled "Walking" were presented across New Jersey in 1852 and 1856. The two component texts were joined for posthumous publication as the lead article in the June 1862 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Publishers Ticknor and Fields issued the piece following Thoreau’s intense final efforts while dying of tuberculosis to edit and organize his unpublished manuscripts to provide financial support for his widowed mother and unmarried sister.

Hermeneutic Frameworks and Transcendentalist Identity. Scholars analyze the hybrid structure of "Walking" through diverse critical lenses. Psychoanalytic critic Richard Lebeaux interprets the work as Thoreau's culmination of a new self-identity. Having previously inverted his given name from David Henry to Henry David, Thoreau "gloried in his identity as the saunterer, the bold and free crusader and observer of the 'other' Concord" (Lebeaux 128). Scholar Joel Myerson situates the essay within broader historical and philosophical paradigms, reading it as Thoreau's "Transcendentalized version of the New World Eden and manifest destiny concepts" (Myerson 154).

Demonstrating multifaceted conceptual dimensions, "Walking" opens with a declarative assertion that complements his political treatise "Civil Disobedience": "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" (225). Myerson notes that the narrator's voice occupies a "frontier" position bridging wilderness and village, radical simplicity and refined culture (134). Following this opening, Thoreau delivers another radical statement: "I wish to make an extreme statement," utilizing an extra-vagant linguistic posture as a Transcendental analogue designed to outwalk the conventional mindset of the village.

The Etymology of the Saunterer and Everyday Practice. In his second paragraph, Thoreau incorporates etymological wordplay and hyperbolic rhetoric. He traces the term saunterer to Sainte Terre (Holy Land crusader) and sans terre (without home), redefining the "greatest vagrant" as one who remains stationary in a house all the time. Juxtapositioning his practice against historical crusades and referencing a broad range of literary sources, Thoreau invites the reader to join his physical and intellectual journey: "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" (226).

· Practice duration: Thoreau records that his daily excursions typically average four hours in length to prevent physical and mental stagnant rust.

· Village critique: He queries why townspeople between four and five o'clock fail to explode in general protest against house-bred notions and antiquated habits.

· Structural digressions: As is his custom, Thoreau incorporates commentary on why women walk, differences between how a surveyor and a miser walk, the linguistic meanings of village, and his original poem "The Old Marlborough Road".

The Metaphor of Westering and Absolute Wildness. The poetic verse transitions into a mini-philosophical essay addressing human orientation and natural magnetism:

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtile [sic] magnetism in nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea. (233–234)

Developing his conceptualization of westering, Thoreau constructs an individualized paradigm of manifest destiny, declaring that he must walk toward Oregon rather than Europe and celebrating the setting sun as "the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow" (234–235). Similar to Herman Melville's exploration of "Whiteness" in Moby-Dick, Thoreau probes the symbolic resonances of westward movement and pristine nature. Cataloging historical travelers and philosophers—including Christopher Columbus, Arnold Guyot, André Michaux, Sir Francis Head, and Carl Linnaeus—he unifies these motifs in his famous declaration: "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World" (239). He defends uncultivated swamps over formal gardens, prioritizing desert solitude where pure air compensates for lack of moisture.

Aesthetic Elevation and Posthumous Legacy. Thoreau extends the concepts of wildness and tameness beyond physical ecosystems into classical literature, myth, and human leadership. He argues that "wildness is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the Scriptures and Mythologies" (244). He outlines a border life along the edges of nature, expressing a willingness to follow ideal natural impulses through unimagined sloughs. Transitioning to a direct appeal, he encourages readers to ascend above mundane perspective: "I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill... I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before" (253).

The essay concludes with an autumnal sunset scene carrying transcendent overtones: "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day, the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light" (255). Scholar John Dolis notes regarding this sunset imagery: "Don't be deceived by all this pleasantry: everything's directed toward the west, toward sunset and the end of things. It's autumn now, not spring. It's evening" (198).

· 1851: Thoreau begins compiling journal notes and delivering public lectures under the title "The Wild".

· 1852–1856: Delivers lecture series on "Walking" across venues in New Jersey.

· May 6, 1862: Thoreau passes away from tuberculosis in Concord.

· June 1862: Posthumous publication of "Walking" as the lead essay in the Atlantic Monthly.

For Discussion or Writing. The theoretical and literary themes of "Walking" offer crucial frameworks for academic analysis:
1st point: Define the concept of the wild as presented throughout the text; evaluate whether Thoreau's sharp contrast between the wild and the civilized village stems from 19th-century Romanticism or carries broader ecological implications.

2nd point: In light of political tensions in Massachusetts during the 1850s, examine how "Walking" participates in broader socio-political debates beyond a simple retreat to a New World Eden.

3rd point: Analyze Thoreau's extensive references to remote geographical locations and historical figures—such as Shanghai, Cochin, India, Nauvoo, the Moselle, the Mississippi, Americus Vespucius, John Bunyan, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Columbia, Confucius, Dante Alighieri, Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Head, Homer, John Milton, Mohamet, Nicéphore Niépce, William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser—determining whether they serve rhetorical ornament or core structural metaphors.

Thoreau's "Life without Principle": Radical Living and Moral Critique

Overview and Textual History. As the title of this essay suggests, Henry David Thoreau confronts readers with a radical way to live by presenting an account of how not to live. As William Cain points out, the title is also a pun on principal: as does Walden's chapter "Economy," this essay examines the costs and rewards of accommodating a commercial, unthinking world. Given at least six times in the 1850s (it was his most frequently delivered lecture) as "What Shall It Profit?" and later edited as "Higher Laws," the essay was given its punning title when the Atlantic Monthly published it posthumously in 1863. If "Walking" wanders in its logic, "Life without Principle" is "one of the most cogent essays [Thoreau] ever wrote" (Harding, Days 342).

Anticipating the John Brown essays, it is, in the eyes of Len Gougeon, "a true jeremiad" (206); some might simply call it crotchety, but Thoreau himself called it "a strong dose of myself" (Gougeon 206). Not only does "Life" sum up Thoreau's philosophy, returning to the principles and prejudices of Walden and most of his essays, it also shows off most of the rhetorical strategies discussed by Richard Dillman: use of symbolic language, of synecdoche, of imagistic language blended with concrete language, of successful (not faulty) syllogisms, of a sure handling of paradox, aphorisms, and proverbs (Dillman 1-4). The essay thus operates simultaneously as personal manifesto and as a virtuoso demonstration of transcendentalist rhetoric.

Rhetorical Strategy and Tone. The speech begins in a tone of modest levity: "There is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the country, — and not that I should say pleasant things merely . . . and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent" (348). They do "have" him, but Thoreau's voice is boring only in the sense that it bores in against his mercantile neighbors. Echoing himself, he draws a distinction between the money-driven, hard-but-fruitlessly-working mass of men ("Most men," "my neighbors"). Here he is even more pointed than in Walden: "The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward" (350). The lecture therefore begins by disarming its audience before delivering its most stringent critiques.

Especially for a writer the exchange of labor for money seems repellent: "The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man," he says (351), making it personal with "I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage" (352). Of course, he was writing and speaking for money himself—or at least for the support of his family after the death he could foresee. He worried to a friend, "After lecturing twice this winter I feel that I am in danger of cheapening myself by trying to become a successful lecturer" (Myerson 87). This self-implication lends the essay its distinctive blend of irony and moral urgency.

Sermonettes on American Life. What follows is a series of sermonettes attacking nearly every segment of American life: those who engage in meaningless labor and those who hire them; those who seek gold and those who buy it; those who preach and those who listen to preachers without questioning them; those who are nationalistic; those who operate the criminal system and those who allow them to do so without conscience; and—here it comes—those who hold slaves. One is tempted to ask how he can get up in the morning in such a meretricious, shallow, selfish, and evil world, but his attacks are so precisely stated and so neatly balanced between wit and righteous anger that the reader keeps reading and writing down the diamond-sharp sentences. The cumulative effect is a moral inventory of a society that, in Thoreau's view, has substituted profit for principle.

Commerce, Press, and Spiritual Priorities. Of the intersection of commerce and politics, he rails: "And have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living, digging where we never planted?" (354). Life and gambling are one, he says: "What difference does it make, whether you shake dirt or shake dice?" (354). If work for money is spiritually stupefying, then "a man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread" (357). These aphorisms condense Thoreau's critique of a culture that measures worth exclusively in economic terms.

When he takes on the press, he sounds like his neighbor in Amherst, Emily Dickinson, declaring that "the only news [he knows] / Is bulletins all day / From Immortality." Thoreau is not quite so pithy: "We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor." His account of the press of his day seems distressingly familiar. News, he says, is "stalest repetition" (359) and "idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind" (360). The critique of journalism here anticipates modern concerns about information overload and manufactured distraction.

Rather than engaging in such trivia, he would have his listeners/readers return to the pleasures of "Walking": "The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say so much to me. You cannot serve two masters" (359). And rather than attending with nationalistic fervor (another scourge) to revolutions afar, Thoreau urges an attention to "your own affairs in Massachusetts fields" (359). He escalates the metaphors. Those who waste time on transitory news and do not spend enough on their spiritual lives, Thoreau says, "will live [as though] . . . being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hills and dales, and biting each other's ears" (360). This image morphs into an even stranger, cartoonlike image: "It has appeared to my mind's eye, that when they [the neighbors and spectators and—later in the essay—mere Jonathans] took off their hats, their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between which even their narrow heads were crowded. Like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad, but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gratings in their coggy brains, passed out the other side" (361).

The Eternities and the Chief Want. Two pages from the end of this spirited and figure-filled romp, Thoreau begins to suggest what one should do among such neighbors and nitwits: "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities" (362). Shortly before the end of the essay, Thoreau reminds us of his title and topic: "The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants" (365). Unlike the sometimes relentless and unremittingly passionate language of his John Brown essays, Thoreau's tone returns to the light, understated tone with which he began the essay: "Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand surely" (366).

For Discussion or Writing. The following prompts invite further analysis of Thoreau's essay, its rhetorical strategies, and its contemporary relevance.
1. Return to Walden and compare the metaphors and specific applications of the word economy in it and in this essay, which puns with the banking term principal.

2. The ending of this essay and the ending of Walden are also parallel. Discuss Thoreau's use of the word morning.
3. To what contemporary civic problems might the high ideals of this essay be applied?