Dear Ellen,

I can feel your desire for the wilderness, and I think many of us find Walden’s supposed escape to live in the mountains at least partially alluring. But it is also too literal an understanding of wilderness. Wilderness is also a state of mind. The differences between dreaming of it and living in it are small, as long as you can create it inside your real world. The sense of freedom, openness, space, isolation, and motion which are so connected with wilderness can be felt inside the city, inside a huge crowd, and even sitting in a bustling cafes.

This separation between life in the city and the wilderness is a also a dangerous one as you tend to accept the rules of the city while in it, and though some rules (like don’t walk naked or piss on the street) should probably be observed, your mind should have a freedom to it, and open up a vastness for you. You should be able to be a barbarian even inside the city, at least from a mental point of view.


Living a period in California with its beautiful openness, and time in Paris where you can rarely see two meters ahead without some wall blocking your view, they are very different experiences. It’s important to remind the mind that there are those vast wild areas, and a place from where you can see miles and miles and miles ahead; to see valleys, mountains and the sea. It’s important to remind oneself of that, but then to implement it also when living in the city and among people. 

The open horizons are still there!

Does the fact that some explorers mapped a territory a hundred years ago irreversibly corrupts it? Especially considering that even they were really preceded by the natives of the lands they explored, and their discovery was only such from a European point of view.

Modern development is still mostly concentrated around large metropolitan areas, and you can experience the frontiers to different degrees, from simple rural life to outright isolation in uninhabited wilderness. And you can access these realms easily for a few hours, make long cross-country treks or commit yourself to a journey of several months, it's all still there, as it always has. Most countries in the world, certainly the United States, still have vast stretches of wilderness where one can completely be engulfed by pristine nature as far as the eye can see without a trace of civilization.

Apart from oneself, that is.

Thanks, both of you, for very enlightening posts. It's a strange but interesting movement: something which I really do experience as vanishing and as something which doesn't have to do with me, but which you both in different ways point out is something which is always there (in a concrete sense), and, as you say Damien, always both is and is not unknown territory.

If I were to push the thought a bit maybe I enjoy the feeling that I live on the outskirts of a certain immensity, but like this I never exactly confront it. 

Hugh, it is a beautiful statement that one should be able to be a barbarian in the city, but what exactly does this mean? If we're thinking of the wilderness not as emptiness but as something very full (of a certain kind of life, certain silences, animals, light), who is the barbarian -- is he someone who follows another law or who follows no law at all? He's not just the American in Paris.

I suppose it's true intellectually that I sometimes feel I am in the midst of a wilderness despite all the chatter going on around me. But there's always the deep and basic question of how literally to read the world. Yes, I have a conceptual understanding of what it means to be alone in the middle of empty space. But the fact remains that I haven't had this physical experience. And I'm not sure I would know where to begin...