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12 Feb 08
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Henry David Thoreau saw our modern confinement coming in his June 1862 Atlantic magazine essay, Walking:
... 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. ... I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since ... the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, ... but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. ...
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." ...
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? ...
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...
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only--when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
Are Thoreau's "evil days" here? For the ground-bound, certainly, but it is possible to fly almost anywhere in the United States one wishes for the simple pleasures of looking and photographing.
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