Week 2

I was reminded of the term ‘apostasy’ within Thoreau's essay Walking. He is encouraging the unification of humans and a natural life without restriction from religion, tradition, authority, and society. Apostasy is the abandonment of religious belief, and I believe through this essay, Thoreau is saying that instead of conventional religion we should look to the ‘wild’.

Thoreau believes civilization and productivity are the main threats in our lives. I align more with Solnit’s belief that erasure, forgetting, and domination are the main threats that walking can mitigate. The presence of a threat can motivate people to do anything, beyond the limits of societal regulations. Thoreau’s threats are self imposed, created in his head but embodied through 19th century human behavior. A lot of his justifications for prioritizing solitude, intellectuality, and challenging stimuli through nature comes from his motivation to be counter cultural, and dissolve the threat of conformity.