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. . . .
