E. B. White's "Walden" and Annie Dillard's "In the Jungle" are essays about journeys the writers have taken that are designed as responses to journeys the writers have read about. White is sympathetic to the spiritual journey that Henry David Thoreau recounted in his Walden--the story of a two-year retreat in a small cabin. In a letter to Thoreau he contrasts the comic horrors of his modern pilgrimage to Walden Pond with the quiet, contemplative pleasures the nineteenth-century writer found there. Dillard, on the other hand, is out of sympathy with prevailing notions about travel and its purposes. She does not respond to any particular source but to the kind of general ideas that might be featured in travel posters or advertisements. Her method consists of interrogating some slogans about travel and supplying answers with the account of her own trip to Ecuador. White comically attempts to make the familiar strange while Dillard locates the familiar in a strange place.
These writers share, however, a sense that everything is not right about their world. Though their essays were written 40 years apart White and Dillard both feel that something is missing from their lives and they go looking for it. In the search it is the distance between humanity and nature that becomes the focus of their attention.
White's reading of Thoreau has made him aware of the terrible speed at which modern Americans move. The irony is that where Thoreau saw a danger in the pace of life in the mid-nineteenth century that pace has only increased in the intervening years. Life seems so much more hectic to White that Thoreau seems all the more relevant. But White also recognizes that what Thoreau sought was an ideal that left no room for life as it must necessarily be lived by the vast majority of people. He humorously makes it clear that, while he feels a longing like Thoreau's, he too is caught up in the tide that overwhelms the writer's shri...