Emerson’s essay, “Country Life” was originally the opening lecture of a course given in the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston, 1858. The essay is not really about living in the country. Instead, it’s more about walking and why spending time in the fresh air is good for us.
While we have given up nomadic life for settled homes, our ancient urges are still in us and the desire to travel usually strikes in the spring and summer. But travel isn’t necessarily hopping on a train or boat and going to distant lands. Travel for Emerson means walking around your own district, or, if you must go far, climbing a nearby mountain or visiting the ocean will suffice.
Emerson talks about Linnaeus who, according to Emerson, insists on “the necessity of traveling in one’s own country, based on the conviction that Nature was inexhaustibly rich.” He goes on to tell of Linnaeus taking his students out for day-long walks at least once a week. As fascinating as Linnaeus and his walks must have been, it is the great walker that Emerson knew personally with whom I’d like to spend the day.
Late in the essay Emerson talks about how it is eminently convenient to have a naturalist living in your town and how every town should have one. He explains that a “true naturalist” can go wherever he wishes even onto farmer’s lands who would rather he not cross them. But the farmer can do nothing about it and, Emerson implies, the naturalist has more right to be there than the farmer does. Then he made me laugh out loud:
My naturalist [emphasis mine] knew what was on their [the farmers'] land, and the farmers did not, and sometimes he brought them ostentatiously gifts of flowers, fruits or rare shrubs they would gladly have paid a price for, and did not tell them that he gathered them in their own woods. Moreover the very time at which he used their land and water (for the boat glided like a trout everywhere unseen) was in hours when they were sound asleep. Before the sun was up, he went up and down to survey his possessions, and passed onward and left them, before the second owners, as he called them, were awake.
Emerson’s naturalist was his dear friend Thoreau whom Emerson seems to have possessed as Throeau possessed the farm fields and woods. What a pair these two are and how I wish I could go back in time and follow them unseen as they trooped through the countryside.
As simple as we might think walking is, Emerson laments that few know how to take a walk. He has often thought of publishing a book, Art of walking, with Easy Lessons for Beginners. Too bad he didn’t! However, we get glimpses of what it is he would have said in his book.
No one starts out as a good walker. Becoming a good walker takes time and persistence, and years. Beginning walkers are apprentices. If they persist and gain an intimacy with their surrounding country, if they know all the good places to visit within ten miles and the best time and season to visit them, if they know where are the best lakes and hills as well as the best berries and rare plants, and if, even as they know all this they continue to learn, then, we can call these walkers professors. Now, along with all of that,
The qualifications of a professor are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for Nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. If a man tells me that he has an intense love of Nature, I know, of course, that he has none. Good observers have the manners of trees and animals, their patient good sense, and if they add words, ‘t is only when words are better than silence. But a loud singer, or a storyteller, or a vain talker profanes the river and the forest, and is nothing like so good company as a dog.
Simple instructions for how to become a professor of walking. We just need someplace to walk.
The best place for walking is broken country. If you live in Illinois, you are out of luck according to Emerson, because there is no good walking in the entire state. It’s too flat. I’ve never been to Illinois so can’t attest to whether it is as flat and dull as Emerson says it is. While we want broken country, we also don’t want anything too hilly because too much climbing is no fun. We want changes of view and surprises, not pitons and Sherpas. And if our walking happens to take us by an abandoned orchard, all the better. Emerson drools over pears, peaches and cherries gone wild, but especially apples. Emerson had his own apple orchard and cultivated dozens and dozens of varieties so he was something of an apple connoisseur.
Walking “is one of the secrets for dodging old age,” suggests Emerson. Walking in a forest awakens in one the same feelings as it did when one was young. Plus, it allows us to see that it is “the old trees that have all the beauty and grandeur.”
Walking also cures insanity. There are plenty who are insane that are not in hospitals. You can see them in crowded cities, hotels, theatres, and among the speculators rushing to invest, more, more more! The power of the open air and a field will restore the mental health all but the worst off.
A walk in Nature not only exercises the body but also the brain. There is nothing as good as fresh air to wake up the mind. Walking also brings us nearer to the source of all things. We are humbled before our Creator and the immensity of life.
Emerson nicely sums up his thoughts about walking thusly:
I think ‘t is the best of humanity that goes out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for this walking. Can you hear what the morning says to you, and believe that? Can you bring home the summits of Wachusett, Greylock, and the New Hampshire hills? the Savin groves of Middlesex? the sedgy ripples of the old Colony ponds? the sunny shores of your own bay, and the low Indian hills of Rhode Island? the savageness of pine-woods? Can you bottle the efflux of a June moon, and bring home the tops of Uncanoouc? The landscape is vast, complete, alive. We step about, dibble and dot, and attempt in poor linear ways to hobble after those angelic radiations. The gulf between our seeing and our doing is a symbol of that between faith and existence.
Go on. Go outside. Go for a walk.
Next week’s Emerson: Concord Walks
