No More Learning

The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my
body is,--I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my
senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of
something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good
works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I
have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great
happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours'
walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.
A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as
the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within
a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and
the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become
quite familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,
simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest
stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle
of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was
his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without
crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by
the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside.
There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From
many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The
farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and
their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade
and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the
most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the
great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field
into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off
to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from
one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not,
for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion
of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the
thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin
_villa_, which together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and
_vella_, Varro derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living
by teaming were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile, also _villain_. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel
that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.