“In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau, in “Walking”
It’s not in the complexities of this structure—nor in any kind of virtuosic linguistics—that I love this sentence, but because of Thoreau’s development (over his truncated career) of his idea of “wildness,” an idea that may not be new, but is, perhaps, the quintessential forerunner to modern ecological awareness, an idea exploring the expansive canyons that Thoreau cleaved between his own ideas and those of his then-contemporary Transcendentalists (Emerson, for instance), and idea that is—for most readers—completely uncharted territory; and, when I’ve taught Antebellum American Literature, it seems that most of my students (and, I’m assuming, many other readers out there) view Thoreau as the practical side of Emersonian Transcendentalism: Emerson expressed the ideas, and Thoreau walked the walk; and while that might have been true about the Thoreau of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and of Walden, even in Walden the roots of Thoreau’s original thinking germinated from their seed and began making their way through the soil of his prose; for example, in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden, Thoreau’s famous depiction of catching a glimpse of a woodchuck crossing his path one night, when he’s suddenly “tempted to seize and devour him raw,” but he explains that it’s not because he was hungry that he wanted to eat the woodchuck, but because he was hungry for the “wildness which he represented,” a wildness defined as Thoreau’s occasional drive from a spiritual height toward the seeming opposite of the lowness of an animal: both sides of Thoreau’s humanity that he says he embraces; yet, by the time of his essay “Walking” (first delivered as a lecture in 1851, and published posthumously), “wildness” takes on a different meaning, where he says, “I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness,” and that he’s going to make an extreme statement, that what he’s been preparing to say is “In Wildness is the preservation of the world,” that every civilization is descended from a once-wild people, that “Give me a Wildness no civilization can endure,” because, for Emerson, seeing the bare common upon which he steps and becomes a transparent eyeball; he sees the reeds bend to him and he to them and he becomes part and parcel of the universe, achieving a spiritual link to the physical world, but Thoreau takes his view of humanity’s relationship to nature farther, as it’s in our civilization’s dichotomy of desires, when it comes to the wild, that we have always been at odds, and Thoreau shows us that encountering the wild refreshes us, even though it has long been a human trait to exasperate the resources of any given habitat, and so Thoreau, unlike Emerson, became an advocate of wild places, of unadulterated nature; and, finally, we find ourselves here today, still dealing with what to do with the wild when we face a world in which the single most important global issue humanity faces is the havoc we’ve reaped across the planet, and the consequences thereof—we would do well, methinks, to read more of Thoreau.