{Walden Pond Thoreau Quote by Joanne C. Sullivan via flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0}
So, who’s been reading Walden?
During the break we posted Part 1 of this enlightening article written by our high school literature teacher, Paul McCullough, to introduce our current Parent Reading Group book. Today we continue with Mr. McCullough’s reflections on this classic, in which you will see that this book is terribly relevant today and worthy of reading and discussing.
If you’re not sure how to start thinking about Walden, today Mr. McCullough will give you some points to ponder. Yes, this is a little lengthy, but read on and you will be completely prepared to dive deeper into this book and get more out of it than you thought you would!
So grab a cup of coffee or tea, find a comfy spot, and settle in for an insightful look at Thoreau’s Walden. Then join the community by coming to one of our parent book club discussions next weekend! (Dates are listed at the end.)
We call books classics not because they have all the right answers, but because they ask the right questions. The abiding questions. The questions Google can’t answer. How much is enough? What makes a home? What do we have to offer one another? What, finally, is worth a life? Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) is a classic in this sense. It urges us to go and see for ourselves what a strange and marvelous thing this existence is, insisting that we make something of it. You could say that Walden is fundamentally a book about dwelling—about living in right relation to oneself, to others, to nature. It reminds us of what we all know but keep forgetting: that the answers to the questions that matter most must finally be our own. They must be lived. They almost never begin with “more.”
Until recently, Walden adorned nearly every high school literature syllabus in the land. Most people recall that it’s about a guy who lived in a shack by a pond for a year, who shunned society and wrote some lofty and curmudgeonly things about simplicity and non-conformity and all the rest—things that sound good in theory but are woefully impractical in real life, as everyone knows. Or worse, they smack of trying too hard to be different or profound. Snippets from Walden seem tailor-made for those inspirational posters you sometimes see on cubicle or Facebook walls. “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” “Simplify, simplify.” Thoreau, like his mentor Emerson, regularly falls victim to the fact that he wrote so many killer sentences. Today, when rebellion is skillfully marketed to us from youth (Think Different™) and the pursuit of personality has all but replaced the cultivation of character (what is celebrity but a self that has become a brand?), Thoreau’s imperative to think for oneself is both more needful and harder to hear than ever. His quotability has become a liability in our soundbite culture which prefers the breezy wisdom of the aphorism—quick, undemanding, and pre-digested.
But just as Walden is about a life slowly lived, it is a book that asks to be slowly read. You have to be willing to ponder the pond, as it were—to see the thawing of the ice or the appearance of a fish as a potentially significant event. Approach Walden as you would a stroll in the woods: once you stop trying to get somewhere, you realize that you are somewhere.
And what kind of book is Walden anyway? It defies the usual genre distinctions we want to draw between literature, philosophy, and natural science. In one sense, it reads like a memoir, a book about withdrawing for a single calendar year to a small cabin in order to “find oneself.” (Thoreau seems to have started the trend among modern memoirists of structuring his story as “My Year of…” A cursory search reveals: My Year of Spotify, My Year of Saying Yes, My Year of Meats, My Year of Star Trek, My Year of Living Gratefully, My Year of Living Jewishly, My Year of Online Dating: A Postmortem. Apparently doing something—anything—for exactly one year is the key to getting published.) But Walden is more than just Eat, Pray, Love for introverts. The book is a great mind thinking. It is self-conscious about its myth-making and symbol-mongering, by turns a lyric essay, philosophical treatise, agrarian handbook, political manifesto, mystical vision, pioneering ecological text, book-length Zen koan, and American Veda.
These many compositional modes reflect Thoreau’s concern for truth in all its forms. Perhaps out of such a synthesis a more generous, less provincial picture of reality might emerge. It’s like the old story about the blind men and the elephant: each man attaches himself to a small part of the enormous living creature, mistaking his particular leg or trunk or tail for the whole, and arguing vehemently with the others about what the elephant is really like, whether it’s hard or soft or flat or round or furry. Drawing upon the epistemic humility of the Bhagavad-Gita no less than the reformed liberal Protestantism of his day, Thoreau understood that “the universe is wider than our views of it.” Each new discovery we make seems to confirm the mystic’s basic intuition that existence is an infinitely faceted thing. The sages and scientists have been right to wonder at it.
Thoreau’s love for the natural world, in all its particularity, also made him a skilled amateur scientist (the Latin root of amateur is, of course, ama, “love”). His meticulous records of the temperature and thickness of the ice at Walden Pond are still used by climatologists today, reliable data from the nineteenth century being sometimes difficult to come by. Many early ecologists such as Rachel Carson and Edward Ricketts looked to him for inspiration. And even from his hermitage on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau managed to befriend the most eminent biologist of his era, Louis Agassiz of nearby Harvard University. The critic Guy Davenport recalls “an occasion when the two [Thoreau and Agassiz] went exhaustively into the mating of turtles, to the dismay of their host for dinner, Emerson.” He may have been a founder of transcendentalism, but Thoreau was a devotee of the ordinary as well.
How strange, then, the persistence of Thoreau’s reputation as a whimsical dreamer who disdained the common, practical stuff of life. “There is plenty of sturdy sense mingled with his unworldliness” George Eliot wrote in a contemporary review of Walden. It all depends on what you mean by “sense.” “If a man spends half his day walking in the woods for the love of it, he is considered a danger to society,” Thoreau muses; “if he spends that half day sheering down those woods before their time, he is considered an industrious and enterprising citizen.” Less acquiring and more delighting? Less bustling and more being? How can you run a sensible economy like this?
It’s not unfair to say that Thoreau was a brick-thrower. But whenever we are piqued by an author, it’s useful to ask why. Thoreau is an essentially contemplative writer, an apostle of inwardness who cherished silence, solitude, and the blessings of idleness—values that cut against the grain of industrialized nineteenth-century society, much as they do today. In what follows, just replace “newspaper,” “post office,” and “letters” with “Instagram,” “email,” and “likes” to see just how timely and countercultural Thoreau’s experiment in simplicity still is:
When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondence has not heard from himself this long while.
Some things change. Some things never change. If Thoreau viewed the post office, for goodness sake, as an agent of distraction and despair, what would he have thought of iPhones and my beloved AmazonPrime? “We have become the tools of our tools,” he warned. In 1854.
In the Old Testament tradition, the prophets are not simply those who can predict the future; they’re the ones who can read the signs of the present and speak difficult truths to power. The best passages of Thoreau burn with this kind of prophetic insight. Admired by the radical minister and fellow abolitionist Theodore Parker for his non-violent resistance to injustice, young Henry Thoreau, when he was not strolling idly through the woods, could be found aiding ex-slaves along the underground railroad and lecturing on the proposition that all men really are created equal. It’s difficult to recall what a courageous political stance abolitionism was in the 1840s. “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine,” Thoreau preached. His commitment to non-violence was also indebted to New Testament texts like the Sermon on the Mount, which emboldened Thoreau with its scandalously “impractical” teachings on turning the other cheek, loving our enemies, and giving to whoever asks for your shirt your cloak and tunic as well. (Doesn’t this rabbi have any business sense? This is preposterous as military strategy!) Thoreau merely asks what would happen if we took these scriptures seriously, treated them as living and reliable reports on reality. They might turn everything upside down.
Truly, a prophet is never accepted in his hometown, and Thoreau’s writings on social justice went largely unheeded in his own day. Walden was still in its first print edition when Thoreau died in 1862 at age 44, his writings overshadowed by the subsequent carnage of the American Civil War. (“What like a bullet can undeceive!” wrote Thoreau’s contemporary, Herman Melville in his poem on the Battle of Shiloh.) But ideas have many afterlives, and Thoreau’s continue to ramify, not least through their influence on twentieth-century peacemakers like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. One generation’s radical notions—universal human rights, women’s suffrage, human-driven climate change—become the next generation’s common sense. Ever attuned to the “fierce urgency of now,” Thoreau had little patience with the polite rationalizations of bourgeois Boston society or the pieties of a complacent Christendom, more concerned with keeping up appearances than with credible witness.
Walden, it has been fairly argued, is a young man’s book, salted with zeal and shot through with the energy of epiphany. And young men are perhaps fitter to agitate than to deliberate. We are left to wonder in what directions his intensity might have mellowed and ripened had Thoreau lived longer. At his worst, the youthful Thoreau sometimes comes off as naïve, arrogant, sanctimonious, even misanthropic. But at his best, he was a kind of external conscience for his community, prodding others to do what they knew in their heart of hearts to be right. Thoreau realized that “in the long run men hit only what they aim at.” So aim high. “If you have built castles in the air,” he writes, “your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Whatever else you want to say about his idealism, Thoreau put his money where his mouth was—in one case, by refusing to pay taxes that would be used to prosecute President Polk’s unconstitutional and imperialist war (so a young Illinois congressman named Lincoln considered it) with Mexico. The apocryphal story has it that Ralph Waldo Emerson, seeing his precocious friend locked up in the town jail, asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” To which Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” What, it is worth asking, might Thoreau be in jail for resisting today?
Thoreau was always rediscovering the paradoxes of the contemplative life: that the point of turning within oneself is not to escape from others, but to be available for them in a deeper sense. That contemplation and action are not opposed practices. That the soul is vast as the universe. That peace is more than just the absence of war. That real authority, real change is rooted in a life authentically lived. “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” At the end of the day, Thoreau didn’t just stew in his cynicism at Walden Pond, alone and aloof with his books and his bean field, warmed by his little wood fire and sense of self-importance (“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…”). No, he spent his time writing a weird and wonderful book, and books are written for people—even if just to tell them about your misspent year of online dating. To write is an act of faith and hope in others, and in language’s capacity to connect.
Walden Pond Panorama by Gerry Dincher via flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0}
And the writing is at times exquisite. Rarely have style and substance met quite as they do in Walden. These sentences have been justly admired by the world’s greatest writers: Dickinson, Tolstoy, Proust, Frost, and more recently Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, two of the best prose stylists we can boast today. The undeniable pressure of personhood can be felt behind every page. And pervading the whole is Thoreau’s sense of humor. When Thoreau debuted his chapter on “Economy” as a lecture in nearby Salem, the local newspaper observed that it “was done in an admirable manner, in a strain of exquisite humor, with a strong under current of delicate satire against the follies of the times.” Think of him as a bearded, outdoorsy, really smart Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for post-Puritan New England. The review comments that the audience was kept “in almost constant mirth.” If you’re not laughing out loud with Thoreau, read him again.
Laughter is inherently subversive, especially to those selling easy certainties. The same could be said of paradox, that hallmark of Thoreau’s literary technique. “How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?” Thoreau’s paradoxes are witty, but they can be dizzying. As one recent advocate of Thoreau has put it: “Canonical works tend to be patterns, even thickets, of contradiction. Far from teaching consistent lessons, they establish themes, from which successors prove many inconsistent things.” That’s why we have to lose ourselves in Walden’s language in order to find its deepest meanings. You can enjoy the journey without knowing exactly where you’re headed or why. I sometimes wonder if Thoreau himself knew what it all meant, so keen was he to subvert even his own hard-won conclusions. Maybe he cherished simplicity because he was a man of so many subtleties himself. To read Walden is to realize—borrowing an image from another Massachusetts writer, Richard Wilbur—“how much we are the woods we wander in.”
When I was twenty-one, having just graduated from Cal Poly with a BA in English literature, I moved to a small cabin on the Iowa River, just north of Iowa City. Granted: it was almost three times the size of Thoreau's and equipped with modern heating and air conditioning. But it was mostly empty except for my books and dreams and some secondhand furniture. (Thoreau was forced to build a couch out of books to save space. Referring to the unsold copies of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he wrote, “I now have library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”) Like a glass of dirty water, sometimes a person must sit very still for a while before finding some clarity. My first Iowa winter, the temperature dropped to twenty below. Some nights were so cold that time itself stood frozen, and it seemed doubtful whether it would ever begin again. But then came the percussive crack of the ice, the beavers meandering to the shore, the bald eagles presiding in the treetops, and I remember thinking that Thoreau was right: a body of water is a living, breathing thing, and flux is the law of nature’s being. “All there is to thinking,” says Norman MacLean in A River Runs Through It, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.” If you've ever lived near a lake, river, pond, or ocean, you’ll understand.
When all is said and done, the best advertisement for Walden is Walden itself. If none of the above convinces you to pick up Thoreau, there’s always this immortal paragraph, which, like so many of Thoreau’s writings, entered my small and porous brain many years ago and has stayed there, refusing to be dislodged by years of living with less-than-Thoreauvean deliberateness:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
There’s a world of wisdom in that “somewhat hastily.” Thoreau believed that it may indeed be our chief end to, as the catechism has it, “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Then again, it may not. But how are we ever going to know if we keep refreshing our inboxes? The world is full of wonders, hidden in plain sight. Yet much of what we call life is not the genuine article. What are we to make of this dear existence unless we go and see for ourselves?
Thank you Paul! Meeting locations will be announced in the weekly update, and here again are the dates for the upcoming meetings:
- First Meeting (1/15, SLO and Pismo; 1/16, Templeton): Chapters 1-6 (“Economy” – “Visitors”)
- Second Meeting (2/19 SLO and Pismo; 2/20 Templeton): Chapters 7-9 (“The Bean Field” – “The Ponds”) and 16-18 (“The Pond in Winter” – “Conclusion”)
