Walking

Walking is the lecture Henry David Thoreau delivered, in various revisions, throughout the last decade of his life — first at the Concord Lyceum in 1851 and many times afterward. The published essay was revised on his deathbed and printed in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, one month after his death.

The essay is short, but it is among Thoreau's most influential. Two of his most-quoted lines come from it ("in wildness is the preservation of the world" and his definition of sauntering as walking à la Sainte Terre) and the essay's whole argument — that the modern American is in danger of losing the wild from which true human life is fed — has shaped American environmental thought from John Muir to Wendell Berry.