Library / Literature & Fiction
Walking
- Pages
- about 44
- Category
- Literature & Fiction
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 48 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
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. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make
an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the
minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of
that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a
genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived
“from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy
Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a
Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they
who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some,
however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home,
which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular
home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of
successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be
the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is
no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while
sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the
first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is
a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth
and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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