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that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art though to tell the truth at least if their own assertions are to be received most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes as i do but they cannot no wealth can buy the requisite leisure freedom and independence which are the capital in this profession it comes only by the grace of god it requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker you must be born into the family of the walkers ambulator nascitur non fit some of my townsmen it is true can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods but i know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class no doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence when even they were foresters and outlaws when he came to grene wode in a mery mornynge there he herde the notes small of byrdes mery syngynge it is ferre gone sayd robyn that i was last here me lyste a lytell for to shote at the donne dere i think that i cannot preserve my health and spirits unless i spend four hours a day at least and it is commonly more than that sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements you may safely say a penny for your thoughts or a thousand pounds when sometimes i am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon but all the afternoon too sitting with crossed legs so many of them as if the legs were made to sit upon and not to stand or walk upon i think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago i who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust and when sometimes i have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour or four o clock in the afternoon too late to redeem the day when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight have felt as if i had committed some sin to be atoned for i confess that i am astonished at the power of endurance to say nothing of the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months aye and years almost together i know not what manner of stuff they are of sitting there now at three o clock in the afternoon as if it were three o clock in the morning bonaparte may talk of the three o clock in the morning courage but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one s self whom you have known all the morning to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy i wonder that about this time or say between four and five o clock in the afternoon too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street scattering a legion of antiquated and house bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing and so the evil cure itself how womankind who are confined to the house still more than men stand it i do not know but i have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all when early in a summer afternoon we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments making haste past those houses with purely doric or gothic fronts which have such an air of repose about them my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed then it is that i appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture which itself never turns in but forever stands out and erect keeping watch over the slumberers no doubt temperament and above all age have a good deal to do with it as a man grows older his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases he grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches till at last he comes forth only just before sundown and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour but the walking of which i speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise as it is called as the sick take medicine at stated hours as the swinging of dumb bells or chairs but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day if you would get exercise go in search of the springs of life think of a man s swinging dumbbells for his health when those springs are bubbling up in far off pastures unsought by him moreover you must walk like a camel which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking when a traveler asked wordsworth s servant to show him her master s study she answered here is his library but his study is out of doors living much out of doors in the sun and wind will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature as on the face and hands or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch so staying in the house on the other hand may produce a softness and smoothness not to say thinness of skin accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin but methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day the winter to the summer thought to experience there will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts the callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self respect and heroism whose touch thrills the heart than the languid fingers of idleness that is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white far from the tan and callus of experience when we walk we naturally go to the fields and woods what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves since they did not go to the woods they planted groves and walks of platanes where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods if they do not carry us thither i am alarmed when it happens that i have walked a mile into the woods bodily without getting there in spirit in my afternoon walk i would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society but it sometimes happens that i cannot easily shake off the village the thought of some work will run in my head and i am not where my body is i am out of my senses in my walks i would fain return to my senses what business have i in the woods if i am thinking of something out of the woods i suspect myself and cannot help a shudder when i find myself so implicated even in what are called good works for this may sometimes happen my vicinity affords many good walks and though for so many years i have walked almost every day and sometimes for several days together i have not yet exhausted them an absolutely new prospect is a great happiness and i can still get this any afternoon two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as i expect ever to see a single farmhouse which i had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the king of dahomey there is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles radius or the limits of an afternoon walk and the threescore years and ten of human life it will never become quite familiar to you nowadays almost all man s improvements so called as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees simply deform the landscape and make it more and more tame and cheap a people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand i saw the fences half consumed their ends lost in the middle of the prairie and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds while heaven had taken place around him and he did not see the angels going to and fro but was looking for an old post hole in the midst of paradise i looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy stygian fen surrounded by devils and he had found his bounds without a doubt three little stones where a stake had been driven and looking nearer i saw that the prince of darkness was his surveyor i can easily walk ten fifteen twenty any number of miles commencing at my own door without going by any house without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do first along by the river and then the brook and then the meadow and the woodside there are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant from many a hill i can see civilization and the abodes of man afar the farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows man and his affairs church and state and school trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture even politics the most alarming of them all i am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape politics is but a narrow field and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it i sometimes direct the traveler thither if you would go to the political world follow the great road follow that market man keep his dust in your eyes and it will lead you straight to it for it too has its place merely and does not occupy all space i pass from it as from a bean field into the forest and it is forgotten in one half hour i can walk off to some portion of the earth s surface where a man does not stand from one year s end to another and there consequently politics are not for they are but as the cigar smoke of a man the village is the place to which the roads tend a sort of expansion of the highway as a lake of a river it is the body of which roads are the arms and legs a trivial or quadrivial place the thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers the word is from the latin villa which together with via a way or more anciently ved and vella varro derives from veho to carry because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried they who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere hence too the latin word vilis and our vile also villain this suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to they are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them without traveling themselves some do not walk at all others walk in the highways a few walk across lots roads are made for horses and men of business i do not travel in them much comparatively because i am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery stable or depot to which they lead i am a good horse to travel but not from choice a roadster the landscape painter uses the figures of men to mark a road he would not make that use of my figure i walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets menu moses homer chaucer walked in you may name it america but it is not america neither americus vespueius nor columbus nor the rest were the discoverers of it there is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of america so called that i have seen however there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued there is the old marlborough road which does not go to marlborough now me thinks unless that is marlborough where it carries me i am the bolder to speak of it here because i presume that there are one or two such roads in every town the old marlborough road where they once dug for money but never found any where sometimes martial miles singly files and elijah wood i fear for no good no other man save elisha dugan o man of wild habits partridges and rabbits who hast no cares only to set snares who liv st all alone close to the bone and where life is sweetest constantly eatest when the spring stirs my blood with the instinct to travel i can get enough gravel on the old marlborough road nobody repairs it for nobody wears it it is a living way as the christians say not many there be who enter therein only the guests of the irishman quin what is it what is it but a direction out there and the bare possibility of going somewhere great guide boards of stone but travelers none cenotaphs of the towns named on their crowns it is worth going to see where you might be what king did the thing i am still wondering set up how or when by what selectmen gourgas or lee clark or darby they re a great endeavor to be something forever blank tablets of stone where a traveler might groan and in one sentence grave all that is known which another might read in his extreme need i know one or two lines that would do literature that might stand all over the land which a man could remember till next december and read again in the spring after the thawing if with fancy unfurled you leave your abode you may go round the world by the old marlborough road when he came to grene wode in a mery mornynge there he herde the notes small of byrdes mery syngynge it is ferre gone sayd robyn that i was last here me lyste a lytell for to shote at the donne dere leave a comment posted in writing and tagged culture henry david thoreau philosophy walking wild bookmark the permalink wodwo posted on april 23 2011 by wudewasa what am i nosing here turning leaves over following a faint stain on the air to the river s edge i enter water who am i to split the glassy grain of water looking upward i see the bed of the river above me upside down very clear what am i doing here in mid air why do i find this frog so interesting as i inspect its most secret interior and make it my own do these weeds know me and name me to each other have they seen me before do i fit in their world i seem separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped out of nothing casually i ve no threads fastening me to anything i can go anywhere i seem to have been given the freedom of this place what am i then and picking bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me no pleasure and it s no use so why do i do it me and doing that have coincided very queerly but what shall i be called am i the first have i an owner what shape am i what shape am i am i huge if i go to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees till i get tired that s touching one wall of me for the moment if i sit still how everything stops to watch me i suppose i am the exact centre but there s all this what is it roots roots roots roots and here s the water again very queer but i ll go on looking ted hughes illustration by warren draper leave a comment posted in art poetry writing and tagged ahuman dark mountain poetry ted hughes uncililisation wild wildness bookmark the permalink language posted on april 19 2011 by wudewasa makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing ...
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