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    Walking
    Walking
    Walking
    Audiobook1 hour

    Walking

    Written by Henry David Thoreau

    Narrated by Peter Johnson

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    About this audiobook

    A meandering ode to the simple act and accomplished art of taking a walk. Profound and humorous, companionable and curmudgeonly. Walking, by America's first nature writer, is your personal and portable guide to the activity that, like no other, awakens the senses and soul to the 'absolute freedom and wildness' of nature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 10, 2008
    ISBN9781440797996
    Author

    Henry David Thoreau

    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American author and naturalist. A leading figure of Transcendentalism, he is best remembered for Walden, an account of the two years he spent living in a cabin on the north shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and for Civil Disobedience, an essay that greatly influenced the abolitionist movement and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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    Reviews for Walking

    4/5

    177 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is a little gem. It's short, and the writing is lyrical. Clearly, if Thoreau does not inspire you to love nature with this masterpiece, nothing will.
    • 4/5
      Thoreau wrote this essay as a speech, one that he gave a number of times. The piece was published in the Atlantic magazine following his death in 1962. Over the years, I’ve read and enjoyed it several times. Nowadays, most of my walking is around the streets and through a cemetery of a small town in northern California, and not in the woods of my native Vermont. I love the way walking allows and stimulates your mind to wander much farther than your feet. With this reading, I found myself more critical of his language and focus. Thoreau writes about absolute freedom and wilderness, and writes much about land ownership. The language of the period, his historical tangents, along with his focus, simply didn’t feel right or of interest to me at this time. Thinking about my reading experience as I was going through it was very curious, but never a good sign. My concentration or engagement with Thoreau’s words was too distant. I’m afraid if anyone was looking for a structured review of Thoreau’s essay, I’ve got nothing to offer at this time. It’s another example of a reading experience being about where your mind is at the time, and not just the power of the words on the page. Some day, I may come back to Walking and have an entirely different experience, one can never know.
    • 5/5
      I obtained this book or essay from the library as an e-book since it couldn’t provide me with a physical book, or a real book, as I call it.When I’d printed it out it proved to have no page numbers and unfortunately I couldn’t find out the proper order of the pages so I had to read the book haphazardly; but this did not detract from my appreciation of it.The book was published back in 1862 and I found the wonderful, rich elegance of the writing so refreshing.Thoreau was a cultured man, as writers of those days were so he quotes other illustrious authors, also in Latin.The book deals with the art of writing, Nature, Freedom and Wildness. Thoreau refers to “saunterers”; in the Middle Ages those who walked to the Holy Land were referred to as “Sainte-Terrers”, saunterers or Holy-Landers; though he explains that “saunterer” could also have been derived from the phrase “sans terre”, without land or home, or having no particular home.He prefers the first derivation, however, since “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”.He states: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”(Sadly, one of the drawbacks of writers from former centuries is the assumption that only one gender exists, the male gender. One would think that women don’t ever take walks and don’t even exist. Luckily, things are changing now!)Thoreau informs us that he can easily walk any number of miles without going by any house or crossing a road, but sometimes he finds that his body is in the woods but he is “thinking of something out of the woods”.He says cutting down the forest deforms the landscape and makes it more and more “tame and cheap”.He and his companion, which he sometimes has, fancy themselves as “Walkers” or “Walkers Errant”. The Walker Errant is a “sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People”.“It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers.”He feels that he cannot preserve his health and spirits, unless he spends four hours a day, at least, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, “absolutely free from all worldly engagements”.When he goes for a walk, he inevitably decides to walk south-west. “The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.”“We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature – we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.”The author states: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild – in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”He believes in the forest, and in the meadow. “How near to good is what is wild.” The most alive is the Wildness, not yet subdued by man. “I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.”He tells us that we cannot afford not to live in the present. “He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.” He talks of “the gospel according to this moment”.He rejoices that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made “the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society”.“I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre cultivated.”He argues the value of ignorance – there is need for a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful but beautiful, while his so-called knowledge is often worse than useless.Who is the best man to deal with – the man who knows nothing about a subject and knows that he knows nothing, or the one who knows something but thinks that he knows it all?The highest that we can attain to is not knowledge, but “Sympathy with Intelligence”.He complains how little appreciation of the landscape there is among us.To sum up, this little book is a eulogization not only to walking but to the wondrousness of Nature. Wildness and Freedom. Thoreau’s rich style, the like of which is unseen in modern writing, is an inspiration in itself.
    • 4/5
      An absolutely elegant and beautiful piece of writing. Thoreau soars and astounds with his mesmerizing prose that touches on many different themes seamlessly, yet inclusively-- privately. This is not one to be mixed.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This was my second reading of "Walking" and, this time, I chose to read it in nature. That really made all the difference. I found myself hating it this last fall when I read it in the confines of my tiny little room. Surrounding myself in nature and allowing myself to annotate in the margins made me feel like Thoreau and I were on our own walk, having a conversation. Just like any long conversation there were moments I began to zone out and think about other things but overall it is a wonderful read and an experience I will probably have again.
    • 5/5
      Best thing he ever wrote; probably the greatest essay by any of the Transcendentalists. Its greatest paragraph: "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 to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy."
    • 4/5
      Indeholder "Ole Jacobsen: Indledning", "Om at vandre", "En vintervandring"."Ole Jacobsen: Indledning" handler om ???"Om at vandre" handler om ???"En vintervandring" handler om ???