![]() ![]() Southwest, he says, is usually his direction. Sometimes you walk in circles for 30 minutes before knowing in what direction you’re meant to go. Thoreau says that if you stand there, outside, boots on, you’ll find the way you’re supposed to travel. Most days, when I start, I’m not quite sure where I’m going-sometimes I stand in front of my house looking up and down the street, considering what hills, what neighborhoods I want to see today. Henry has sympathy, but ultimately not much use for women, since only a free man is ready for a walk.Ī woman is a useful symbol for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters-“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty…”-but the human women he knows are in the kitchen or parlor, bound to their domestic duties, unable to lace up their shoes and set out. I am a woman, and therefore my kind, “who are confined to the house still more than man,” is not the kind for walking. Okay.īut no, Henry doesn’t even allow me this. (Saunter, from “going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land,” he explained.) Most likely Thoreau would say I am one of the many, the idlers and vagabonds, who walk timidly along the marked paths. It’s the neighborhood, not the forest, and I rarely saunter there. “I wish to speak a word for Nature,” said Henry David Thoreau in his famous essay, “Walking.” And so do I, but the Nature around me is the one he disparaged, carved with concrete roads, lined with fences and For Rent signs. ![]()
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