Walking

Walking by Henry David Thoreau - Akasha Classics AkashaPublishing.Com - I wish to speak a word for Nature for absolute freedom and wildness as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil - to regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of Nature rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement if so I may make an emphatic one for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking that is of taking walks - who had a genius so to speak for SAUNTERING which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages and asked charity under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre to the Holy Land till the children exclaimed There goes a Sainte-Terrer a Saunterer a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks as they pretend are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense such as I mean. Some however would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home which therefore in the good sense will mean having no particular home but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer in the good sense is no more vagrant than the meandering river which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade preached by some Peter the Hermit in us to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.