"I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!"
I explain to students that when I read this section, I always think of a certain path on Roanoke's campus, back when I was an undergrad. Roanoke has all of these really lovely brick paths, but this particular path wasn't paved--it was a shortcut students made to sort of bisect an angle made by pre-existing paths. Over the years I was there, the landscapers would reseed that section, but soon enough, the grass would get trampled and that brown, worn-down (and sometimes muddy) path would reemerge. By my senior year, they gave up and put down bricks over that path. It certainly looked nicer than dead grass and mud, but it did feel like a defeat of sorts.
You can be pretty sure that if not for the "ruts of conformity," so to speak, the landscapers would have won that battle. But once a path is already there--once the grass is pretty much dead--it's much easier for students in a hurry to take that shortcut. (Yeah, I get that one could also say that getting off the paved path is defying conformity, but in this case, it's really not true. Only the non-conformists (and sometimes people in really nice shoes) stayed on that paved path.)
Well, now I have an even better example for my students (just in time, as my summer class will get to Walden next week): another group of landscapers have surrendered, this time on a path at near Shepherd's library. From my first week on campus, I wondered how long it would take...
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