Nature and Walking
- May 20, 2024
- 2 min read
★★☆☆☆
I first read these two essays back in February, while we were vacationing at a very snowed-in cabin in Ponca State Park. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, I decided that I would reread them before considering the matter closed, which I did over the past couple of weeks. While second readings might make for improved comprehension, they rarely make for improved appraisals. Truer words were never spoken.
That Emerson’s Nature, as dry a philosophical exercise as they come, was seen as inspirational to a generation of naturalists like John Muir is astonishing. Either sensibilities and/or expectations in this regard were unrecognizably different 188 years ago, or the canon of nature writing was so slim that any example was worth holding aloft. Finding inspiration in nature in Nature is like someone explaining the beauty of a classic car by providing a list of parts and the instructions for its assembly. Alas, I don’t think Aristotle's sum-parts memo made it to Emerson, who clinically dissected nature to bits on the way to understanding but killed the poor beast in the process.
Thoreau’s Walking started with a bang, though, and I had high hopes (despite finding Walden a disappointment eight years ago): “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness …” Yes, please! Ostensibly about walking, or sauntering, as Thoreau prefers, Walking is no more focused than an unplanned ramble: it meanders this way and that according to its whims, following its muse where it might, with all the digressions, tangents, and apropos nothings you might imagine, each thought connected by a thread, however fine, to the one preceding. As you might imagine with a piece that often feels like an unfiltered and unedited stream of consciousness, the exuberance doesn’t last, and Walking plods along, sometimes peaking, sometimes valleying, and sometimes in misguided ways, before eventually circling back to the point (walking) and closing in its final paragraphs nearly as well as it began.
There certainly are fine lines throughout from both Emerson and Thoreau, Instagrammable quotables to pair with that perfect photo. For my money, the chaff-to-wheat ratio was too high, and though I didn’t much care for these pieces, I am grateful for each’s impact on the naturalists who followed.
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