“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 a la SainteTerre,’ to the Holy Land…
“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.
“In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.
“In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones.
“Here is this vast, savage, hovering mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
“We hug the earth—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me—it was near the end of June—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.”
« In literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. »
I was also thinking of movies. And wild can have a lot of different meanings, I would say, wild love, wild adventures, wild behaviour.. There is something that we can find in books and movies that we can’t find in our lives. That is wildness, adventure. I always loved magic stories, for their adventurous, true, natural side. I always felt like we are not alive to do basic things, to go to work everyday. In centuries, people always had to fight everyday to survive, to make their own food, to rase their children, to learn life by themself. We are now so lazy about life that going one day walking for 2 hours can be in a way difficult, to get out of our habits.
To come back to walking, I can understand how it can be a reconnection to nature, to our wildness. But I often think too much when I walk. Coming back home more scattered than before. So the wildness isn’t here that much. I think walking is like everything, for some people more than others.