where i haven't been

In my first post for this class I wrote (a little bit) about the first time I went to Yosemite and how I just had to go there if I was going to be working on Muir for the rest of my life(ish). But that doesn't mean I've been everywhere. Far from it.

I haven't been to Walden Pond. Or Concord. The horror!

Actually, I haven't been to Massachusetts at all since 1992, and then I wasn't studying the Transcendentalists. I did, however, eat some fine cannoli in Little Italy. But cannoli aren't very Thoreauvian, so back to the point.

The point is, not a day goes by that I don't think about Walden Pond or Concord. It could be that I'm trying to paint a picture in my head while I'm reading some primary text or secondary scholarly article, and I'm always reading one or the other. But it also could be (and most likely is) that I can't consider myself a scholar in my chosen field until I do my best to follow Thoreau's map of the pond, or I wander down the path into town and pop in on someone for dinner and conversation (ok, I wouldn't really do the latter, but I would walk into town just so I can chuckle at how not in the wilderness HDT actually was...the weenie).

And, as morbid as it sounds, I feel like I need to touch all the authors' gravestones on Author's Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

I'm not sure how all this will help me develop as a person or a scholar, except to say that I honestly believe I won't be "complete" until I, uh, complete that task. I have to walk in their footsteps (even to their graves) and see some of the same things they saw (what's 150 years of changes between friends?). If I'm to make historical and/or cultural claims about people and places, I need to have shared the same spot of earth with them.