Henry David Thoreau: “Excursions” (1863)

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We
require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between
eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our northern
Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the
summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a
march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably
better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness
whose glance no civilization can endure, as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured
raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush, to which I would migrate,
wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other
antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every
man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person
should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of
nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits
the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales
from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle
their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have
frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than
white for a mana denizen of the woods. ‘The pale white man!’ I do not wonder that the African
pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, ‘A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like
a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing
vigorously in the open fields.’
Ben Jonson exclaims,
How near to good is what is fair!
So I would say
How near to good is what is wild!
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its
presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his
labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new
country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over
the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.
(in Charles R. Murphy, ed. Little Essays from the Works of Henry David Thoreau, pp. 139142)

source "Against Civilization" by John Zerzan