A Long Walk Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Sam Powers

Mrs.Moore

Honors English 10

3 February 2023

Henry David Thoreaus’ “Walking”: Exploring Engagement and Awareness

A person walks into a random high school classroom one Wednesday. It is later in the day and the person can feel the weariness and boredom from the students in the room from miles away. The people at the back are hiding their phones under their desks, more than a handful are asleep, one even snoring. Others fiddling their thumbs and bouncing their legs. The person asks themself what does it take for someone to really be engaged and aware? Henry David Thoreau seeks to explore the aspects and importance by taking a walk in “Walking”, His walks symbolize different decisions in a person's life. Taking different walks and helping

Meaning being the reasons behind and for something. Shown in his walks Thoreau attests, “There is a right way, but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world…and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea” (Thoreau). Although it may be difficult to choose the wrong path every decision has a meaning. People tend to choose the wrong path prior to the first only making their walk longer; at the end of the walk, people will find the true meaning walking possesses all together. Once the person understands the meaning of their walk they will understand true importance. Thoreau validates this with his walks and how he explains a person's overall meaning. Granted, Thoreau expands this idea and clarifies, “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps” (Thoreau). Thoreau elaborates this idea by exaggerating how he

He talks about being connected with one's self and with the world around them. He elucidates, “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (Thoreau). Nature big part of what Thoreau believes is important. The benefit of nature and explaining how people can be a part of nature reveals how he thinks of nature; Being a “Parcel” of something signifies being featured in a way that cannot be avoided (Cambridge dictionary). Being connected to nature allows a person to be more aware of their surroundings and the bigger picture of being a part of something. Thoreau continues, “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports” (Thoreau). Everyone must be themself. Individuality is important to Thoreau in allowing people to truly connect around them and to connect to what is important to them, what is meant for them. Everything happens for a reason. Using the comparison of cultivating every acre of the earth gives a picture of overpreparing and ruining the