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Thoreau’s view, Homeric in its grandeur and simplicity, imagines the vastness of the Ocean as all-enveloping, all-encompassing mother. The shield of the earth floats in its waters the way an embryo floats in amniotic fluid. It isolates, as Winnicott said a good parent should, without insulating.

I keep a bottle of Walden water at home on the windowsill; sunlight refracts through it. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin wrote Thoreau. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. Thoreau’s lake is an island in negative, the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye,looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Thoreau here implies that we are forever isolated from one another – an archipelago of individuals – despite his decision to island himself at Walden Pond. His book Walden sought to make a peace between his obsession with the woods, and with the pleasures – intellectual, social, physical – of society. That aspiration seems a fair summary of what I’m trying to do here : offer a simple and sincere cartography of an obsession.
Once I am at leisure, said Salvatore, I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat. All day long I am surrounded by the clamour on the editorial floor,but in the evening I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water.
[Herman Melville] On South Georgia the longing was strong to lose oneself in the mountains, to walk for days high in the ice, in timelessness, and see only rock faces, delicate shades of lilac and crimson, the only focus point for the eye that of infinity.