Proper walking, or sauntering, requires that the walker leave everything behind and submit fully to the experience of the walk, forgetting the town and avoiding the narrowly constricted path afforded by the well-defined road. The walker naturally chooses a route outwardly symbolic of "the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world," into the wild. In thus heading both outward and inward into the wild, we ensure not only our own health and well-being, but the very preservation of the world as well. We ignore our need to acknowledge and explore the real and metaphorical wild at peril to ourselves as individuals and as a civilization.
Thoreau examines our openness to the wild while walking by contrasting the "wildest dreams of wild men" with the common sense that prevails in society, "Useful Knowledge" with "Useful Ignorance" or "Beautiful Knowledge." The walker surrenders himself to the experience of nature and thus gains an inspired insight unobtainable through the facts and skills accumulated through traditional learning. He seeks an elusive kind of knowledge, one that is not easy to obtain and that is granted unpredictably. Thoreau admits that his own comprehension of the meaning of nature is imperfect, and that man's ability to perceive the universal laws behind nature may not be fully equal to the task. He writes that knowledge is the "lighting up of the mist by the sun," and that "with respect to knowledge, we are all children of the mist." Only by recognizing, accepting, and celebrating the wild reality in nature and beyond the veneer of civilized life will we see through the mist. This process will be unsettling. The primitive within man is deep and savage in some respects. Walking requires a willingness to embrace "a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure, — as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw." The best that we can do is to remain alert to evidence of this possibly unfathomable knowledge. Thoreau writes: "My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence." As in A Week and Walden, he repeatedly deals with the subjects of perception and perspective, with the heightened, unbounded consciousness necessary for the intuition of universal law — perhaps the most important theme of "Walking."
