No More Learning

The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits
which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case
opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I
turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the
southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that
I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind
the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk
thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on
this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the
prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say
that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,
and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.
The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.
"The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a
shoreless sea. " It is unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into
the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is
a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed
this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before
it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest
walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in
some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe,
impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they
were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its
particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging
narrower streams with their dead,--that something like the _furor_
which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred
to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles
over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real
estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that
disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes. "

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.