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At present, we travel through an urban environment
of almost-immediate communication of person, thought, and word. The advantages
of such a world are not dismissed in this new work, but rather respectfully
challenged in a language and pace extraordinary and lush. Joshua McKinney
wonders at the continuum of nature and draws upon the expert exploration
of Thoreau to conclude that questioning of place and meaning is not a
finality, but rather the beginning of sauntering.
afterword
There are enough champions of civilization. How are we to proceed, who
wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness?
Sauntering: not a tour, but a never-ending enterprise.
Playful and serious. Thoreau discovers his own etymology for the word.
The saunterer may begin, he says, in the familiar fields of Concord, and
some time later find himself in a place where "...jurisdiction ceases,
and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested."
Locale becomes unimportant. Do we go anywhere? Thoreau is able to glimpse
Elysium only while in motion -- the physical act of walking, part of the
discovery process. A wholeness enacted by mind and body.
Sauntering: a fourth estate. Errant. Outside Church and State and
People.
What do we call this wholeness? All words are problematic, for to see
wholeness everywhere is to see it nowhere. In the act of writing we face
choices of inclusion and exclusion, the familiar question of whether to
attempt to put all in or to leave all out. Not a tour, but a never-ending
enterprise. We have no way of knowing what might be dispensed with,
what omitted. So everything is necessary. Every least thing.
Sauntering: an inclusive indirectness that unifies diverse terrains.
Wildness is not dependent upon a vast unsettled tract. Rather, it is a
quality of attention to boundaries and divisions, to spaces between. We
change. The terrain changes. Meaning is elsewhere, in the intervening
absences where the borders of our lives meet other borders, borders that
are other. And yet the seams are hidden from us. The joinery. Like lightning
they are revealed only in flashes, perilous and transitory, never in the
same place or pattern. New divisions. New borders.
There are enough champions of civilization. How are we to proceed, who
wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness? At
the borders of the Holy Land of language, there is only the purposeful
indirection of sauntering.
--J MK
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