The Pursuit and Comprehension of the Wild. Thoreau prepared the essay “Walking” for publication during his final months. It forms part of a cluster of natural history writings that he worked on late in his life. (Among the others, “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples” were, like “Walking,” published in Atlantic Monthly in 1862, after Thoreau’s death.) “Walking” represents a final statement of Thoreau’s understanding of nature. It contains ideas expressed in his earlier writings, presented imperatively. Its tone is visionary. Although the essay resulted from the union of two lectures prepared in 1851, it is difficult not to think of it as a deathbed communication, an ultimate, emphatic reiteration and extension of themes developed throughout Thoreau’s writings, a final exhortation to the reader to be alert to nature.
Thoreau makes clear in the first sentence of “Walking” that nature in its most intense form—“absolute freedom and wildness”—is his subject. Throughout the essay, he exalts unconfined wildness in both nature and man, and rejects the forces (the past, society, and the materialistic values of the present) that inhibit the full experience of nature and that limit thought and expression. The heightened, unrestrained, frequently impassioned rhetoric of the piece stylistically reinforces Thoreau’s message.
In defining all that he means by wildness, or “the Wild,” Thoreau develops the metaphor of “the West.” The west, the direction in which he prefers to walk, evokes the American frontier and the vast, unexplored, wild landscape beyond it, and at the same time suggests the uncharted, boundless, as yet unrealized possibility of man. His discussion of the west reveals the powerful fascination that westward expansion held for Thoreau.
Although territorial acquisition as supported by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny had, in the spread of slavery, consequences Thoreau found unacceptable, the symbolic west in “Walking” possesses a mythological significance. The west represents health, vigor, new ventures with unknown outcomes, and the future. The west is full of promise:
. . . I saw that [the west] was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not. . . .
Thoreau prophesies an American mythology based on the potential of the west. In contrast, the east, where lies the Old World, represents the history, art, and literature of the past.
In “Walking” as elsewhere in his writings, Thoreau explores the idea of a fit expression of wildness, an expression not achieved by English literature nor by any poetry yet written. He writes:
I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You name it America, but it is not America. . . . There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
In Atlantis and the Hesperides, the ancients had their own “Great West, enveloped in mystery and poetry,” which can be recaptured each time we look “into the sunset sky.” Thoreau refers to Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a she-wolf and went on to achieve greatness through the founding of Rome. He finds in this ancient Roman legend an elemental recognition of man’s connection to the strength-giving wild. The story contains a truth that transcends what we narrowly think of as reality: “The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable.” Mythology is a form unbounded by the limitations of fact and common sense. It exists independent of time and place in its relevance as a universal statement.
