Forging in the Smithy of the Mind Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking” and the Problematic of Transcendence

• Published in: Reading Essays p. 93
• Main Author: Atkins, G. Douglas
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United States University of Georgia Press 25.01.2010
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Artists; Biological sciences; Biology; Biomes; Blacksmithing; Children; Constitutional rights; Ecology; Economic disciplines; Economics; Ecosystems; Electromagnetic radiation; Electromagnetism; Employment; Essayists; Freedom of speech; Fundamental forces; Grasslands; Human populations; Labor economics; Law; Legal rights; Light; Locomotion; Materials science; Meadows; Metallurgy; Musculoskeletal physiology; Occupations; Persons; Physical sciences; Physics; Physiology; Population studies; Smithing; Social sciences; Sunlight; System physiology; Walking; Writers
• ISBN: 082032826X; 9780820328263

LYDIA FAKUNDINY IS RIGHT, AS USUAL: “Walking, rambling, sauntering, strolling, wandering are more than recurrent topics of essay writing; they’re images by which essayists like to figure their particular mode of discoursing, tropes of essaying itself” (15). The titles of early “essay periodicals” (as Fakundiny calls them) affirms the point: if not already Addison and Steele’s Spectator very early in the eighteenth century, certainly by the time Dr. Johnson called his The Rambler, then The Adventurer, and finally The Idler. Understandably essayists are fond of walking and of walking as subject; see, to name only those who spring immediately to