It just happened again someone sent the Deseret News a press release quoting Henry David Thoreau as saying, "In wilderness is the preservation of the world."
This is only the latest misuse of that quotation as supporting the wilderness concept.- "Eliot Porter, author of In Wilderness Is the Preservation of Man and Down the Colorado, among other books, is recognized as the finest color photographer alive today." Promotional material from the hardback version of Porter's Appalachian Wilderness: The Great Smoky Mountains.
- "The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wilderness is the preservation of the World." Thoreau's essay "Walking" as reproduced in The American Transcendentalists, The Johns Hopkins University Press, edited by Perry Miller.
- "The quest for wealth was replaced by a search for wilderness as a new generation of Americans adopted the message of Thoreau, that `in wilderness is the preservation of the world.' " From Stanford E. Demars' The Tourist in Yosemite, 1855-1985.
The citations all glaringly misquote Thoreau.
The passage is from his essay, "Walking," first published in the June 1862 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Consulting my bound volume of the original magazine, the correct quotation is:
"The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world."
It's easy to see why someone would confuse the words wildness and wilderness, since they have the same root and involve related concepts. But there is a distinction between them - the difference between the freedom of the mountain lion and the mountain where the lion hunts.
While earning her master's degree a few years ago, Cory, my wife, took a class at the University of Utah about the age of Transcendentalism. Among the required texts was Miller's book. The American Transcendentalists seemed a fine compilation and I was glad she was perusing "Walking," but then she spotted the erroneous use of the word wilderness.
Next I was surprised to hear her announce she had finished the essay, shortly after starting it. How could anybody could whip through its 10,000 words that quickly? Examining Miller's book, we found that not only does he make mistakes in capitalization, punctuation and wording, but he leaves out huge chunks.
Also, he takes awful liberties with ellipses. A paragraph is jammed together with another that actually occurs a dozen paragraphs later, and they are presented as if they were one, with ellipses in the middle.
What kind of a hack would butcher this incomparable essay? Checking the biographical note, we find, "Perry Miller (1905-1963), distinguished literary critic and scholar, was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University."
Maybe that explains it. Thoreau graduated from Harvard and thought little of it. Perhaps Miller was getting even for Thoreau's referring in Walden to the school's "crowded hives."
By wildness, Thoreau means the freedom to follow one's true nature.
As he makes clear in "Walking," he celebrates the wild streak: "Our ancestors were savages," and "Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest," and still later, "Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet."
The misquotes of our era in no way tarnish Thoreau's reputation as a great wilderness advocate. In fact, his may have been the first nationally published argument in favor of wilderness protection. It was a position he held both publicly and privately - for an example, an interested reader could look up Thoreau's Oct. 15, 1859, journal entry.
One of Thoreau's best summaries of what he meant by preserving wilderness is the last paragraph of "Chesuncook," his report in the Atlantic of his observations in the Maine Woods. It was published in the magazine's August 1858 edition.
"The kings of England formerly had their forests `to hold the king's game,' for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be `civilized off the face of the earth,' - our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation, - not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?"