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Guye Blood
Dr. Hepworth
English 101-09
13 November 2008
The Wilderness v. Walking
What is the thesis of Walking? What is the Thesis of the Wilderness Letter? Are the
authors asking a guestion or making a statement? Were the authors influential during their
lifetimes? Both Thoreau and Stegner are passionate authors of different times and a different
era, but each has an adoring kinship for the wilderness and advocate for its preservation.
In 1851 Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture entitled Walking that was later published,
after his death, in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. In 1960 Wallace Stegner wrote a letter to David
E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center entitled The Wilderness ; that letter was later
published in his book The Sounds of Mountain Water.
One has to wonder if Stegner and Thoreau came from the same cloth. Each had an
appreciation for the value and sanctity of the wilderness. B oth showed a respect for its
boundaries, unlike the common man surrounded by the wild at civilization's edge -- hurrying
about his daily tasks of destroying one to build another -- who never stopped long enough to
ponder its destruction. Thoreau writes of his distress concerning the destruction of the wild:
from surveying property owners ascribed in their deeds, to home builders destroying the forests
that surrounded town, choking off and polluting his access to his freedom and absolute need to
walk unobstructed in any direction. Stegner, 100 years later, lives in a society already
encroached upon by Thoreau' s distresses. He too argues for the preservation of the last of the
Wilderness -- if for no other reason than just to know the Wilderness exists for the renewal of his
sanity, health and spirituality.
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The similarities go on and on, but the differences in their styles are evident as well.
Thoreau lives in more rugged times and is hardened by the wild, as he alludes to in his published
lecture: man and farm animal can be tamed to civilization, but in each are still wild oats to be
sown. Thoreau prefers returning to the wild with a walk, to sitting in civilization's soft cushion.
Stegner, less hostile toward civilization, still makes the point that society will lose its freedoms
and its retreat from its very own pollutants if we continuously encroach upon, and destroy, the
Wilderness. He eguates the death of the Wilderness with a death in us: "...as the remnants of the
unspoiled and natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss, is a little death in me. In
us" (Stegner).
Each author is different in their styles, times and eras, yet both champion for the
preservation of not only a geographical place, but a realm of self-renewal. Further, they seek a
place where we can return to the wild- peace in each of us, a status symbol of our freedoms and
what it means to be an American -- a place that can only be described as the Wilderness.
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Works Cited
Stegner, Wallace. "Wilderness Letter." The Wilderness Society . 3 Dec. 1960. Accessed 17 Sept.
2008 <http://www.wilderness.org/ourissues/wilderness/wildernessletter.cfm>.
Thoreau, Henry D. "Walking." Transcendentalists . 1862. Accessed 29 Sept. 2008
<http://www.transcendentalists.com/walking.htm>.
