Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place - Softcover

Mitchell, John H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201154870 ISBN 13: 9780201154870

Publisher: Catapult, 1997

Synopsis

One brilliant day in October, John Mitchell and two friends began a fifteen-mile walk to the tomb of Henry David Thoreau. Starting from an ancient burial site where, according to legend, a Scottish Earl became lost on a quest for the Holy Grail, they bushwhack through the landscape where our literature and history began: the woods favored by the Transcendentalists and the Great Road followed by the minutemen as they marched to the Old North Bridge. On each mile of this quintessentially American pilgrimage the author and his friends explore not only the natural landscape before them but also certain timeless themes: they wonder at the force that drew pilgrims to certain sacred sites, the sense of place that brings artists to Tuscany or Provence, and that deep abiding allegiance to place that binds each of us, if we are lucky, to a particular beloved spot.

About this title

About the Author

JOHN HANSON MITCHELL is the author of five books based on a single square mile known as Scratch Flat, as well as two travel books and the biography of the early African American landscape photographer Robert A. Gilbert. A winner of the John Burroughs Award for his nature essays, Mitchell was founder and editor of Sanctuary magazine, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. In 2000 he won the New England Book Award in nonfiction for his Scratch Flat series. He lives in Littleton, Massachusetts, the location of Scratch Flat.

From Publishers Weekly

Observing that pilgrimage to spiritual centers is not Anglo-Saxon Protestant America's thing, Mitchell (Ceremonial Time) and his companions Kata Grant, a specialist in Native American basketry, and Barkley Mason, a birdwatcher and seeker, set off from their Massachusetts homes on Columbus Day 1994 on what they consider a sacred journey to Concord, ending in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts are buried. Their 15-mile walk to this perceived "centering place" took them along the overgrown paths of the Minutemen of 1775; as Mitchell reminds us, the point of a pilgrimage is hardship, endurance, cleansing. The friends exchange tedious talk of Odysseus, the Holy Grail, Native American folklore, Columbus "the oppressor," Ponce de Leon (whose Fountain of Youth the trio sought on an earlier expedition). Although there's a smugness about these folks in their certainty that Buddha and Krishna share their sensibility, Mitchell shows his acuity in his ruminations on "place," which he ultimately discerns is to be found in the exoticism of the familiar. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Catapult
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0201154870
• ISBN 13: 9780201154870
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316