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Week 6 - Wordsworth and familiar places

Wordsworth’s walks around Tintern Abbey are enlightened by time and repetition. He had visited so often that walking around the abbey led him to recall, and reflect, on the ways that time has changed him. He writes in “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey” that as a young man he came through those hills “like a roe,” bounding, running like he had something to be running from. My Tintern Abbey is called Dogwood Park, and it’s a playground in my hometown with a little loop through a small forest. In addition to the main playground, little miniature play areas are spotted around the loop, each themed after nature: one has a rope jungle gym themed after a spiderweb, another has a spinning contraption resembling a cocoon, another has a dragonfly see-saw. I visited a hundred times when I was young (actually young, perhaps younger than Wordsworth had in mind when he saw himself “bounding” like a deer), and when I walk through that loop now, I can recall a hundred different memories ...
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Neo Romantics: Mary Oliver's relationship to nature

  Neo Romantics: Mary Oliver I’ve already written a blog post complaining about Henry Thoreau, so it’s now time for my favorite topic; Mary Oliver. When Thoreau writes about walking, he sees the act as one of independence. To walk alone, in nature, sets a man apart, Thoreau writes in "Walking"; it makes him part of nature, not part of society, and sets him towards a great and higher purpose. Mary Oliver’s poetry is sparser in its language and less forthcoming with its philosophy, but the philosophy is there nonetheless. In her poem “When I am among the trees,” nature exists alongside the walker like an old friend. “They give off such hints of gladness,” Oliver writes of the willows, the oaks and the honey locust. If Oliver’s nature is a person, then its personhood is her salvation - the gladness of the trees saves her daily, she writes. The trees invite her in to stay.  While in Thoreau’s essays nature redeems him, strengthening him in his independence, the redeeming qualitie...
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Week 2 - Deconstructing Thoreau

  Philosophies of bipedalism, David Thoreau, and the male loneliness epidemic In my mind, there is a loosely related network of items which, taken together, explain why I don’t really like Henry Thoreau. Here they are: 1. A man who walks is of a superior sort, Thoreau posits in his essay “Walking.” The non-walker, by contrast, develops certain traits: “softness and smoothness,” being thin-skinned, and, for women, sleeping all day. 2. Thoreau also posits that his habit of walking in nature, so far from society, mirrors the preferences of “the old prophets and the poets”: Homer, Chaucer, Moses. 3. His other heroes include Romulus and Remus, who, he says, can embody Wildness itself because in the absence of a mother they were raised by a wolf. Unfortunately for the rulers of later Roman kingdoms, these did have mothers instead of she-wolves; Thoreau suggests this was their undoing. 4. Thoreau’s mother did his laundry while he stayed in the cabin. 5. Thoreau writes that he is drawing e...
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Week 4: Walking as Activism and the "No Kings" protests

Walking as Activism.  I’ve reported on the No Kings protests twice now, once in Bloomington and once in Indianapolis. As we read about the ways that walking has been treated as activism, the ties between collective walking, protest, political unity and the sometimes warlike motifs used in peaceful political movements, images from No Kings kept floating to mind. In Martin Luther King’s “Our God is Marching On,” he speaks about the fight for civil rights as a battle, in line with other conflicts “fought and won” in Alabama’s history. The associations between walking together into battle and walking together into protest didn’t undermine MLK’s peaceability, but instead underscored the critical necessity of the march and acknowledged the violence endured by black communities and civil rights activists. Then there’s another side of collective walking, one closer in theory to Peace Pilgrim’s joyous approach to the craft. A collective walk can also be a parade, where spectacle, imagery an...
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Homelessness in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Throughout Cormac McCarthy's The Road , the two main characters' shopping cart is both essential equipment and a burden on thier ability to properly manuever and survive. This is established early on in the narrative: "He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it" (5-6). It's accepted truth that their greatest asset is also their greatest liability, and contradiction stands at the heart of the novel: it's true of all the items they accumulate, yes, but it's especially true of the boy, who slows the journey down considerably and yet is the man's only reason for embarking on the journey at all. These contradictions also remind one of the fact these characters, all of them, are homeless and permanently displaced. Their tattered clothes, their uncertain access to food and shelter, their shopping cart, bring to mind images of the homeless in o...
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Fake It 'Til You Make it: Walking as Simulation in Stewart's "Walking Distance"

                 In Stewart’s piece “Walking Distance,” she contextualizes her walk and her stream-of-consciousness thought in the streets of New York. Of all the walking writers we have read this semester, Stewart feels the most immediately relevant to contemporary young people. She frames walking as a kind of bildungsroman, using stream-of-consciousness thought as the medium through which this process unfolds. “Walking Distance” is decidedly inquisitive and free-flowing—it claims that walking is like a life simulator, a test-drive for young adults.  What I mean by this is the physical space traversed in a walk becomes a simulated version of progress, something inherently rewarding for young people who may feel lost, stagnant, or unsuccessful. Walking simulates success, progress, and achievement. Stewart acknowledges this inner turmoil characteristic of young adults, reminding me of myself and my friends who are college students. S...
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Walking Socially

 Going to the dog park for a walk is a strange experience, mostly because most of the walks we've discussed have been, in my mind, alone. I instinctively think that every walk we talk about is maybe not meant to be alone, but is implied to be solo. At the dog park, you may arrive alone (with your dog, typically), but it is almost impossible to go without some sort of interaction. At its busiest times, there are up to thirty people there, almost all of them having nothing better to do than chat with the other people there. It is also so much different as the age demographics of people vary wildly. There are plenty of college-age students, but also a range up to the elderly, too, as many of the locals prefer the specific dog park that I go to.  I normally like to just walk around the outskirts of the park, get my steps in, and watch from afar as my dog enjoys its social time. By doing this, though, I am missing out on learning about so many different people, all with wildly diff...
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