In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Thoreau says it in “Walking,” and Jack Turner, in his exquisite collection of essays, The Abstract Wild, questions how many of us have any idea what it means. People often misread the quote, Turner points out, as “In wilderness is the preservation of the world;” but Thoreau did not say that preserving wilderness preserves the world; he said that wildness preserves.
What does this mean? Turner has tracked down a reference in Thoreau’s “Fact-book” to the word “wild” as “the past participle of to will, self-willed.” The wild, then, is the self-willed, that which lives out of its own intrinsic nature rather than bowing to some extrinsic force. But we are also confused, Turner says, about what Thoreau meant by “world:”
Near the end of “Walking” he says: ‘We have to be told that the Greeks called the world κόσμος, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.’ Our modern word is cosmos, and the most recent philological studies suggest the meaning of harmonious order. So in the broadest sense we can say that Thoreau’s “In Wildness is the preservation of the World” is about the relation of free, self-willed, and self-determinate “things” with the harmonious order of the cosmos. Thoreau claims that the first preserves the second.
Okay, then. So what does that mean, and what do we do about it?