Thoreau also wrote of the tendency of travel away from the familiar to distract and dissipate the traveler.
But Concord was for Thoreau representative as well as concrete, and his sense of place in relation to Concord was generic as well as specific. In an undated journal entry recorded after July 29, 1850, he wrote:
I, too, love Concord best, but I am glad when I discover, in oceans and wildernesses far away, the materials out of which a million Concords can be made, — indeed, unless I discover them, I am lost myself, — that there too I am at home.
The critical fact about place is how the individual internalizes and interprets the reality around him, no matter where he is.
And yet, seemingly inconsistently, Thoreau did travel some actual distances at various times in his life — up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers with his brother John, to New York, Maine, Cape Cod, Quebec, Mount Monadnock, the White Mountains, and Minnesota. Moreover, in keeping with the Romantic impulse to write about travel to faraway places, Thoreau incorporated into his work what he observed on his journeys. He traveled partly "to give our intellects an airing," partly to seek out locations possessing greater wildness than could be found in Concord. Moreover, he was interested in examining the particular relationship between a man and his environment, the affinity between man and place. In his travel narratives, Thoreau delineated certain individuals who seemed to have been organically shaped by landscape and occupation.
Transcendentalism incorporated the Romantic emphasis on the individual and the Unitarian belief in the goodness and perfectibility of man. These ideas are expressed throughout the writings of its proponents. The importance of the individual in relation to God, nature, and human institutions is at the heart of Thoreau's work. Thoreau wrote in his journal entry for August 24, 1841, for instance:
Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still. By reason of this, if we look into the heavens, they are concave, and if we were to look into a gulf as bottomless, it would be concave also. The sky is curved downward to the earth in the horizon, because I stand in the plain. . . . The stars so low there seem loth to go away from me, but by a circuitous path to be remembering and returning to me.
