The Geography of a Life

I’ve spent enough time with Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau that they feel less like historical figures and more like friends that you can really talk to. I am separated from these men by centuries, cultures, and landscapes, yet both of them speak to things I have come to recognize in myself.

When I was younger, I moved through the world the way Montaigne did on his travels— curious, restless, eager to see what lay beyond the next bend in the road, and how far I could go. Now I’ve found myself settling into Thoreau’s mode: rooted, observant, content to let a single place reveal itself over time. Not only has my personal philosophy changed, my way of traveling through the world did, too.

Montaigne’s Travel Journal strikes me as the record of a mind in continual motion. He wasn’t just sightseeing; he was learning. Every inn, every dialect, every meal, every discomfort became part of his thinking. Even his damn kidney stones shaped the journey. He writes about his body with such frankness that you can feel the ache in your own side. But what moves me most is his openness. He let foreign places rearrange his assumptions. He let travel polish his judgment. He trusted that movement itself was a kind of education.

I understand that version of myself. I used to love travel — not necessarily the logistics, but the feeling of stepping into a place that wasn’t mine and letting it change me. I’ve been to many of the places Montaigne describes, and reading him now feels like walking through my own memory. But travel in the third decade of the twenty‑first century is different. Airports, crowds, delays, the sheer friction of movement — it feels more like a huge burden than an adventure. The curiosity is still there, but the appetite is not. I’m no longer Montaigne on the road.

Thoreau, on the other hand, has grown more familiar with time. He is thought of now by many as some dreamy idealist wandering around Walden Pond with transcendental thoughts. I think that those people have never read his book. He itemized the cost of building his cabin down to the penny and recorded it all. He measured the thickness of ice, the angle of sunlight, and the timing of blossoms. He believed that the entire universe could be found within a few miles of Concord if you paid enough attention. Even the retreat to Walden was a just short walk from his mother’s house — close enough to bring home his laundry. Thoreau wasn’t escaping society; he even talks about gatherings of his friends in the cabin.  He was conducting an experiment in how to live deliberately, not in isolation.

That really resonates with me now. The space where I am writing this essay is about the same distance from my own house as the distance from the cabin on Walden Pond to the Thoreau home. I’ve lived long enough in one place to know how much a landscape can teach you if you stay still.

Santa Fe has become my own Walden — not in its simplicity, but in its depth. The civic life, the land, the history, the daily movement through familiar streets: these have shaped my thinking more than any distant country could do now. I don’t need novelty to feel awake. I just need to pay attention.

So when I look at Montaigne and Thoreau today, I don’t see two opposing philosophies. I see two phases of a life — my own life. Montaigne taught me what it meant to move through the world with curiosity. Thoreau taught me how to stay in one place with clarity. Together they form a kind of map for me: one for youth, one for maturity, both pointing toward the same destination. The real journey, whether across Europe or around a pond, is the one that leads a person back to himself.