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.Somehow reminds me of this man:
I'm in love with modern moonlightYouTube excerpts of Thoreau live are hard to come by, but here's a version of fellow New England eccentric Jonathan Richman:
128 when it's dark outside
I'm in love with Massachusetts
I'm in love with the radio on
My only other note is that Thoreau, like a punk songwriter, likes to say the same thing over and over:
No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.Thoreau, again like Jonathan Richman, wants you to see what he's driving at.
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