Who would you like to begin your summer with? This year, I choose Henry David Thoreau. His essay “Walking” celebrates the art of meandering, sauntering and getting lost in fields and woods. He is drawn to the forest, the meadow and “the night in which the corn grows.” He urges us to keep going “til one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn” (504).
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, 1995, p. 500.