Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on Snewscast.com and follow us on Instagram, add Snewscast to find behind the scenes content. If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the Apple Podcasts app. Please know that we read and appreciate every single one. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by far off pastures. Tonight we'll read The Wild, sometimes known as Walking, a lecture by Henry David Thoreau first delivered in 1851. It is a transcendental essay that analyzes the relationship between man and nature, trying to find a balance between society and our eye and world nature. Zero reads the piece a total of ten times more than any of his other lectures. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the solveness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. 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 empathetic 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 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 to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, there goes Asintaire, a Saunter, 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 sunturs in the good sense, such as I mean. However, would derive the word from sontair, 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. who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the saunter, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the me-endering river, which is all the while 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. It is true, we are but faint hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk per chance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embombed andmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. 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, then you are ready for a walk. To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves nights of anew, or rather an old order.

Not equestrians, or cheviliers, not ridders, or riders, but walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The heroic spirit which once belonged to the writer seems now to reside in or perchance to have subsided into the Walker, not the Knight, but Walker-Arent. He is a sort of fourth estate outside of church and state and people.

We have felt that we almost alone hear about, practiced this noble art. Though to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, Most of my townsmen would fame walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy their 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. 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 there were foresters and outlaws. And he came to the Greenwood in very morning, very hurt and notlaws. When he came to the green wood, in Mary morning, very hurt and not small of birds Mary singing, it is fair gone, said Robin, that I was last here, me list a little for too shot at the dawn deer. 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 of 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 forenoons, 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. 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 astonished at the power of endurance. To say nothing of the moral insensibility of my neighbors who can find themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, I, in 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. Napoleon 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 at 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 cacophony 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 it cares itself. No doubt temperament and above all age have a good deal to do with it. As one grows older, their ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases, you grow vespertinal in your habits as the evening of life approaches. Till at last, you come forth only just before sundown, and get all the walk that you require 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 dumbbells or chairs, but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go and 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. Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wood's worth servant to show him her master's study, she answered, here in his library, but his study is out of doors. much out of doors doors in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character. We'll 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, 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 shown 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 me thinks that is a scurff 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 Libre are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart than the language fingers of light on this. That is mere sentimentality. That lies, abed, by day, and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callous 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 sex 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 plantains, where they took ambulations and 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 there. 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 feign 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 feign return to my senses. business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself I 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 a strange 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 Dehommie. 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 three score 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 to form the landscape and make it more and more tame and cheap. The people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand. I saw the fences have consumed their inns 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, stigian fen, surrounded by spirits, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that his surveyor had ill intention. 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 of afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than wood chucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufacturers 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. And 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 leak of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs. A trivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin Villa, which together with Via away, or more anciently, Ved and Vella. Vero derives from the to carry, because the villa is the place to and from, which things are carried. Hence, too, the Latin word Villes, and our vile also villain, this suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are away worn 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 the much comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern, or grocery, or livery stable, or depot 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 nature such as the old profits and poets. Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America, neither a Columbus, nor the rest or the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than any history of America so cold that I have seen. However, there are a few old roads that may be trotted with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marborough Road, which does not go to Marborough now, me thinks. Unless that it is Marborough where it carries me, I am the boulder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town, where they once dug for money, but never found any, where sometimes martial miles, singly files, and Elijah would, I fear for no good, no other man, save Elijah Dugan, Oh, man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits, Who has no cares, Only to set snares, Who live us 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 Marburo road. Nobody repairs it, for nobody wears it. It is a living way, as the Christians say, not many there to be, who enter therein, only the guests of the Irishman-Gwynn. 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, son of taffes of the

towns, named on their grounds, it is worth going to see where you might be. What king did the thing. I'm still wondering, set up how or when, by what selectmen, gorgeous orly, Clark or Darby, they're a great endeavor to be something forever. Blink 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 withch fancy unfurled you leave your abode, you may go round the world by the old Marboro

Road. you you