sketches of my day May 2008 - Nov 2010

July 10, 
2010

traveling

I read Walden years ago as a college student. I recently recommended it to my brother and in making the recommendation, I became interested in reading it again. I Goggled it and found Spark notes – something I was unable to do in 1976. I found the following explanation of a quote and I am tangling with it this morning. As in everything, it is defined by your purpose. I think traveling, at its best, is seeing how others live, liberating your views and finally going home with a broader scope and a new appreciation of your life. As Thoreau says, however, we can never expect traveling to distant shores to change our soul, for that we must travel inward, a journey that many of us fear and avoid. It is far easier to distract ourselves with trips and things.

 

“ It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar”.

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This statement from the “Conclusion” of Walden illustrates another debt on Thoreau’s part to the American Transcendentalist school of his philosophical mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Emerson’s influential essay “Self-Reliance,” which Thoreau’s Walden project could be said to put into practice, Emerson makes the assertion that “travel is a fool’s paradise,” and that it is far more useful to change one’s soul than to change one’s landscape. The fool who thinks that his life will change on a trip to Europe is shocked and disappointed to discover, after unpacking his suitcase on arrival, that he is still in the same tedious company of himself. For Emerson the futility of travel is simply a consequence of his belief in the centrality of the self—the depth and health of the soul—in all human affairs. Thoreau inherits this same belief, downgrading the usual glamour of international travel (in this case to Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa) with the ridiculous enterprise of counting felines. The point of this mockery is to point to a better alternative to African voyages. As he intimates earlier when he ironically notes that he has traveled a lot in Concord, Thoreau insists that the most valuable kind of travel occurs without leaving one’s hometown: the inward voyage of soul-searching.(spark notes)

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