Perhaps it is in his knowledge that he could not find in his country"s national destiny the meaning of whai it means to be American that Thoreau remains most radically American.An American,properly speaking,is an exception.In America freedom lies just beyond the bounds of the institutional order-a mile from any neighbor,in the adjacent woods of Walden,where forests silence the rumors of the outside world and allow one to discover America in and for oncself.Even on the American continent those who would discover America must reenact the original gesture of departure and seek out the shores of Walden Pond.Thoreau goes into the forest not like medieval Christian saints who sought out an extreme condition where a preestablished truth could impose itself more rigorously upon them.but as one who would put to the test the meaning of being on the earth.Life is an experiment of its meaning,and freedom consists in the chance to undertake the experiment for oneself in the"land of opportunity."Like most experiments,Thoreau"s excursion to Walden sought to establish the matters of fact.The woods do not contain the knowledge that Thoreau seeks by going there;they do,however,uncover the habitual hiding places of the self,leaving it exposed to the facts of life,whatever they be.In his exposure Thoreau presumes to discover his irreducible relation to nature.What he discovers is that this relation remains opaque.We are in relation to nature because we are not within nature.We do not intrinsically belong to the natural order（if we did we would not need to discover the facts of life）but find in our relation our destiny as excursioners on the earth.Thoreau"s allusion to a"next excursion"implies that the experiment at Walden,as well as life in its very essence,are also excursions-excursions into a world where we are at once estranged and alive,or better,alive in our estrangement.Those who have never gone into the woods to"live deliberately,"or who merely drift on the stream of institutional history,never get to the bottom of what life is（and Walden affirms that life does have a bottom）.Caught in the network of social relations,they are doomed to a"strange uncertainty"about life,for,never having essayed their own lives in a test of reality,they hear only vague and contradictory rumors about it,like a foreign country.