Week 9

 After reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson,the text’s focus on walking is unique from everything else we’ve read this semester. When Bryson discusses the actual walking it is either a focus on the physical difficulty of it or is summarized. This works well for the novel’s readability because if every section were Bryson complaining about the walk I don’t think any reader would make it to the end of the book. But, he also discusses how when walking his brain seems to turn itself off and he finds himself lost in the joy of being able to walk the Appalachian Trail. As one reads on the complaining becomes less frequent and Bryson uses these moments to segue readers into the broader topics he explores in A Walk in the Woods. Rather than spending his word count on romanticizing the walk or commodifying it for pure entertainment, Bryson’s mind fixates on an interdisciplinary view of the trail. He floats from discussing the historical elements like the conception and building of the trail, environmental thinking around interconnectivity, and critical thinking about American society from the rugged vistas the trail provides. 


The way Bryson transitions into his reflections while on the trail is unique compared to the other writing walkers from the semester. Rather than proclaiming how the walk is what induces deep thinking and reflection Bryson simply puts his thinking out there and doesn’t attest to walking as a means to an end or space to think. Instead he claims that his mind is turned off most of the time and his joy is felt in the freedom and wonder of being out on the trail in undeveloped nature. The challenge of walking is how walking the Appalachian mountains is usually discussed. Steep mountain sides, fallen trees, constant obstacles, and physical pain characterize the experience of moving one’s feet on the Appalachian Trail. The moments between this challenge are when Bryson explores the broader topics walking leads to. Walking is not a means to end in A Walk in the Woods but it is a means to get from place to place to experience moments that allow us to critically view our society and reflect on where a journey has led us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Stations of the Cross, Political Marches, and Walking as Struggle

When I was much younger, my family would attend, every Easter, a Passion in the Park performance. It was a live dramatization of the biblical passion narrative, starting with the Last Supper and ending, of course, with the resurrection. I was very young, 10 or 11 years old, and I distinctly remember being quite scared by the whole ordeal. For a devout child, who truly believed that Jesus was the son of God and had been sacrificed for our sins, and who truly believed He rose on the third day, the performance was an intensely disturbing one. Looking back now, I'm sure even if I weren't so religious I still would've been frightened: it was never quite The Passion of the Christ , but it certainly didn't shy away from the brutal realities of crucifixion and the gruesome anguish Jesus experienced on the way to Calvary Hill. I bring this up because our discussion about the Stations of the Cross this past week reminded me of it. My family was never Catholic, which meant we neve...
Read more

Week 12 - Night Walking

The birds at my apartment complex still sing at night, which unsettles me. Also unsettling is how the wind blows stronger and colder and all at once; feeling the chill of it, and hearing the roar of it in distant trees, and looking up to see the rapid shifting of silver clouds overhead, I felt like the friendly comfort of being outside on a beautiful day had been replaced by an unpredictable and uncomfortable smallness. It was very late on a Thursday night, the robins were trumpeting their hearts out in the artificial lighting of the parking lot, and my roommate and I were going to go play pickleball.  When Woolf takes a night walk, she pretends she is buying a pencil. My roommate and I are both too busy to do things together except late on Thursday nights, so we really were going to play pickleball. We passed by the complex where we had made snow angels at the start of the first big snowstorm, where I’d dropped my phone with all my cards and by the time I realized thirty minutes l...
Read more

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.
Read more