A WALK TO WACHUSETT

A WALK TO WACHUSETT by Henry David Thoreau is hard for me to read, but it's his first piece. He doesn't get money for it, but it's a wider audience than The Dial which folded after 2 years of exhaustion by Margaret Fuller. It sputters on with Emerson for a little while. 

I just plough through it reading. Thoreau took the walk with Fuller's little brother Richard Fuller, who would go to Harvard when Margaret couldn't. I find it so amazing that that women weren't allowed at Harvard, but then again you see countries like Afghanistan trying to go back to that way of being.

It's a 36 mile drive these days from Concord to the Park to climb Mount Wachusett. 

First America has to get rid of slavery and then get women the vote. It's a march of progress that retrenches and takes steps back. We're witnessing a lot of regression in American society these days. The republicans figured out they couldn't impose their highly contradictory vision on America, so they break it down to smaller things like states. So you can find states that have rancid radical far right policies. And then they pretend that their republicanism got rid of slavery from the democrats. MTV still plays music and Christianity is about helping thy neighbor. The rise of white Christian nationalism in America is quite a shock, and has nothing to do with Christianity. 

Going back to nature was a move the early Americans used to fight against Puritanism, with it's confused vision. We're always fighting against confusion and bewilderment. Everyone is just trying to get a foothold going, some leverage to understand something in the chaos and confusion. If you go on social media, we're exposed to more different perspectives than people used to confront in a lifetime. There are some hiccups in human development as we try to figure this out. 

The funny thing in the essay is he's hiking away from home on an adventure, and when he's at the inn for the night, they give him a Concord newspaper.

A walk, a saunter, a hike is central to Thoreau's response to life. It's friendship. It's connecting to nature. It's healthy. It's out of the all the insanity.