Walk Like a Camel… (Zoom)
Winter (14+ hours) | Registration opens 11/23/2026 12:00 AM EDT
“Walk like a camel,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in an 1862 essay, “…which is said to be the only beast that ruminates while walking.” In this eight-week class, we will read three books about personal journeys taking Thoreau’s advice to the extreme corners of the world. With Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, we will begin on the wild dunes of Cape Cod in 1927, then trek the Australian outback with Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, and finish at the top of the Northern Hemisphere with Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. Not mere rumination, these writings touch on memoir, travelogue, philosophy, nature-writing, and anthropology. This is a discussion class with 100-150 pages of reading for each class.
This course will consist of discussions between the Study Leader and participants.
Required Books:
The Outermost House – Henry Beston (ISBN-13: 978-0805073683)
The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin (ISBN-13: 978-0140094299)
Arctic Dreams – Barry Lopez (ISBN-13: 978-1668074732)
Jon Stableford
Jon holds degrees from Williams College and Wesleyan University and for 43 years taught secondary school English, the last 34 of them at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. In 2010, he and his wife Cindy retired to South Strafford, VT and have ever since had a close relationship with Osher at Dartmouth. He writes occasional pieces for The Valley News.