Home Ground
The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau once wrote words to the effect that everything you need for a lifetime’s worth of fascination lies within a day’s walk out your backdoor. As spring ramps up and we all begin to imagine warm-weather trips, do Thoreau’s words make any sense?
All Island landowners need to escape their patch of ground from time to time, and not just for work or shopping. Besides, tourism has become an industry fine-tuned to meet our yearnings (for better or worse). With so many opportunities to travel, why stay near home?
Several good answers to that question come from research in human psychology and scholarship on American culture. Quick heads-up: academic stuff ahead!
Research in human psychology tells us our brains are wired to focus on motion, whether our own or that of animals/objects in our environment. Research also reveals that our sensing of color is equally keen. Quick movements and brash colors capture our attention the most.
Why these two? Because they offer evolutionary advantages in hunting/gathering and in surviving predators. But they disadvantage us in an environment of speeding vehicles, constant video, and digital images saturated with color. This newer environment overloads our senses, and we learn, paradoxically, to love the intense stimulation. Our sensory baseline shifts, in a bad way: Ordinary things in nature and places familiar to us grow slow, dull, and monotonous in comparison to the hyper-real of our manufactured environment.
Scholarship on American culture tells us an analogous story. It says that one of our society’s main features is restlessness. A nation of immigrants, displaced indigenous natives, and enslaved or colonized peoples is a country steeped in traumatic separation from a home culture and place. So movement has been compulsive and compulsory in a country of people and groups needing to move, willingly or not, in search of opportunity or just survival. The good and bad aspects of this essential American trait are one and the same: a habit of dissatisfaction with what we already have and where we already are, and a yearning for something we imagine is better, often somewhere else.
Combined, these two versions of who we are—individuals craving hyper-stimulation living in a culture of restless movement—seem pretty extreme. But they do make a point. Thoreau’s focus on living intently in the nearby world dissolves a lot of the material dissatisfaction and listlessness we’re forced to feel if we want to be successful or, somehow, worthy to be American. The author of Walden wasn’t so concerned about others’ regard for how he lived, which is to say locally to the extreme. It was a form of civil disobedience we might care to try.
