A short text that praises walking, getting out of the comfort of your house to wander off the beaten tracks, far from the world. Walking to reconnect with Nature and its beauty and understand its importance. But walking also to reconnect with our inner wanderings, our thoughts, and reflect on the connections between Nature and us. Thoreau’s writing has been deemed as ecological literature and this book is something between an essay and an autobiography. An excellent text to start reading Thoreau.
“For I believe that climate does thus react on man – as there is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky – our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains – our intellect generally on a grander seale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests – and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces.”