Thoreau refers to the difficulty of choosing the direction of a walk, asserting that there is a "right way" but that we often choose the wrong. The walk we should take "is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world" — a path difficult to determine because it does not yet "exist distinctly in our idea." Thoreau's own natural tendency is to head west, where the earth is "more unexhausted and richer," toward wildness and freedom. The east leads to the past — the history, art, and literature of the Old World; the west to the forest and to the future, to enterprise and the adventure of the New World. As a nation, we tend toward the west, and the particular (in the form of the individual) reflects the general tendency. Thoreau believes that physical environment inspires man and that the vast, untamed grandeur of the American wilderness is "symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of [America's] inhabitants may one day soar." He expands upon the evidence of history in Europe as reflective of the past. America, whose landscape has not yet been completely civilized, suggests "more of the future than of the past or present." The author sees in the promise of wild America "the heroic age itself."
Thoreau takes up the subject of the wild (synonymous with the west), in which he finds "the preservation of the World." The legend of Romulus and Remus (founders of Rome, who as infants were suckled by a wolf) demonstrates that civilization has drawn strength from the wild. He writes of the wildness of primitive people, of his own yearning for "wild lands where no settler has squatted," and of his hope that each man may be "a part and parcel of Nature" (the phrase repeated from the beginning of the essay), exuding sensory evidence of his connection with her. He equates wildness with life and strength. He himself prefers the wild vigor of the swamp, a place where one can "recreate" oneself, to the cultivated garden. The wild confers health on both the individual and society. "A township where one primitive forest waves above while another . . . rots below" nurtures poets and philosophers. Thoreau perceives agriculture as an occupation that makes the farmer stronger and more natural, and the wild and free in literature as that which most appeals to the reader. Genius is an uncivilized force, like lightning, not a "taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race." Thoreau calls for a literature that truly expresses nature. Although no literature has yet adequately done so, mythology is more satisfactory. The west — the American continent — "is preparing to add its fables to those of the East," and there will be an American mythology to inspire poets everywhere.
