an american philosopher in… america, i guess

Walden: or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and died in Concord, Massachusetts. Largely ignored by his own generation, he is now considered one of the most original thinkers and greatest prose writers of his period (a period he shared with other greats like Hawthorne and Emerson, who also laid some claim to Concord, Massachusetts — if Fredericton is Poet’s Corner of Canada, I think Concord should be Philosopher’s Corner of America). He went to Harvard and, in spite of financial difficulties, graduated in 1837. Harvard was where he honed his skills as a non-conformist, shirking honours and avoiding uninteresting subject matter while being disgusted by the fact of having to spend $5 for his diploma. As expected, he didn’t prepare for a profession, but dabbled in school teaching. In 1842 he was deeply affected by his brother’s death from lockjaw, followed by his father’s death from tuberculosis. In 1840 he decided to become a writer, but he intermittently supported himself through: lead pencil making, surveying, and gardening. (As a gardener, he worked for Emerson, and likely influenced Emerson’s views on the natural world.) He was a champion of the Abolitionist cause before it was politically popular, even in the North; as a result, he went to jail rather than paying the Poll Tax to a government which supported slavery. He was self-reliant and nonconformist, but accomplished this without being anti-social.

Walden (1854) emerged as the only book which garnered attention for Thoreau in his lifetime, and one of only two books he would ever see published. It details Thoreau’s 1845 experience of moving to Walden Pond, where he cultivated a small plot of land and built his own small home. His goal was to prove that a man doesn’t need to go beyond his own resources for sustenance and enjoyment. This became the best example of the American nature book.

The book starts with Thoreau outlining his project — a two year and two month stay at a rude cabin in the woods near Walden Pond). He explains the four necessities of human life, which he determines are food, shelter, clothing and fuel. The bulk of the text will discuss how he goes about providing himself with each item. He also discounts those luxuries that go beyond the four necessities and painstakingly records his expenditures (the cost of his entire sojourn coming to $25). While he celebrates living simply, he also criticizes those who believe that poverty equals moral superiority. The balance, for Thoreau, is not about level of wealth but rather self-sufficiency and independence and simply living.

Thoreau toys with the idea of buying a farm, but determines it to be better to not, because he moved to Walden specifically 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.”

In Walden, Thoreau discusses the importance of classic works of literature from antiquity and of reading them in their original languages. He believes that there is much to learn in all the literature of antiquity because it speaks fundamentally to the human condition. However, he isn’t elitist: he disregards formal education in favour of a community of learning, a kind of utopian future where everyone shares equally the responsible of educating himself and his fellow men. In imagining this future he bemoans the lack of sophistication in contemporary Concord, which is a judgement he bases on the popularity of light literature and travel novels — in short, he holds popular literature at fault. (So funny when you consider how much of popular fiction is now based on or refers to Thoreau — I mean, there’s a whole episode of Fraiser that riffs on Walden, for goodness sakes!) However, as important as the great books are, Thoreau cautions us against limiting ourselves by imagining that all the worthwhile knowledge of the world exists within books. Just as important as those works of antiquity are the lessons we can learn from listening to the natural world and taking in her teachings; Thoreau’s biggest lesson is perhaps the importance of balancing both sources of knowledge.

Thoreau has a complex relationship with his contemporary life. For example, he discusses the train as an image of cosmopolitanism, but also as an image of fear. He’s uncomfortable with the changes the train will bring to his quiet world and the way it contrasts with his desire to see people communing more thoughtfully with nature. It also contrasts with the importance to Thoreau of solitude. A man can find great companionship in the natural world and will find much there to occupy him, but he still stands apart from it because he has the capacity to find solitude in his work. True happiness comes from the company of enjoying the company of a solitary self. Solitude does not require a measure of space, incidentally, but it’s about access to the outside world; the student studying in the busy library is as solitary as the lone farmer, because he is solitary in his toil.

As important as solitude is to Thoreau’s experiment, he is not a hermit, and he entertains often. His means being small, however, he goes to great lengths to explain how not to feed your guests, asserting that it is up to us to change tradition to fit our own reality — just don’t mention food, and others will be too polite to ask. He justifies this somewhat selfish worldview buy asserting that “objects of charity aren’t guests.” He talks about a specific guest who he calls only “the Canadian,” a kind of other everyman who is spiritually dull and deaf to self-improvement, but Thoreau is attracted to him because he thinks for himself.

In an interesting side-observation, Thoreau notes that only children and women seem to like the woods; adult men, he says, claim to enjoy it but would always rather be somewhere else and can only comment on the length of time it takes them to get to Walden Pond.

He discusses his meager experiences as a farmer and outlines his balance sheet from time spent growing beans, which he suggests are not a particularly efficient crop. He believes that New England farmers blindly grow beans because they historically have and because they were taught to by the First Nations, not because it is the best crop. He tries to convince farmers of crop rotation and the importance of leaving food for the local animals so that they can help clean up the fields, but his suggestions fall upon deaf ears.

Thoreau outlines the most important aspects of village life for the people of Concord: the bar-room, the grocery, the post office, and the bank. He talks about gossip as the major pastime for the villagers and worries about its effect on people. He relates his experience, as I talked about in his biography, of being arrested for not paying his taxes as a protest to slavery. (He gets out after one night, incidentally.) This fight against supporting the mechanisms of slavery extends to his conversation with John Field, a poor Irish immigrant. John loves American because he has access to products like tea and coffee; Thoreau tries to explain that John should use none of these items because the taxes on them fund slavery. He tries to show John how to live simply and ethically, but John is too busy applying a failing Old World model to his New World reality. Thoreau is bothered by this kind of self-involvement and believes that Christians should govern themselves as instructs their faith and not be lazy in compliance; there are “heathens” around the world living with more principle than lazy Christians.

Thoreau spends a lot of time talking about the fact that he never needs to secure his home, because he possesses nothing worth stealing. He sees theft as being caused by luxury and suggests that if everyone lived simply as he does, there would be no property crimes. Instead of the material, Thoreau focuses on the natural world around him, especially Walden Pond and other local ponds. He bemoans the lack of appreciation we have for natural objects and points out that if something as beautiful as his beloved pond were solid and material, it would be stolen by slaves for royalty, but since it is liquid and of nature, we ignore it. He believes very strongly that all young men should learn to hunt because it’s only through close relation to the natural world than people learn to appreciate it.

Thoreau illustrates that he is never really alone in the woods by cataloguing the wide variety of animals, birds, and bugs with whom he shares space. Interestingly, he sees little difference between them and men, like when he witnesses the ants at war. He is amazed by how many animals feed in town yet man is blind to all of them — again, he begs us to be aware of the world around us. He likewise explores the winter companions at Walden Pond and their means of survival at length. He is proud of how tame the animals have become around him (for example, he views the sparrow landing on his shoulder as an epaulet). He is never romantic in his tales, however — the animals are not friends but always clearly potential food. The line is very present and stops these accounts from becoming twee.

In discussing readying his home for winter, Thoreau admits that his friends believed he would freeze to death in the woods. The story of fire-making is another means for Thoreau to explain to us about the importance of scavenging (this time for wood) and the waste of contemporary man in not making use of such goods. Like the animals, fire becomes his trusted companion; he bemoans the invention of the stove because it blocks his view to his friend and removes the friendliness from the home.

Outlining the identities of people who used to live around Walden Pond but do no longer, Thoreau wonders why this start at a hamlet failed while Concord has been thriving. He hopes that his home will be the first settlement of a new community, and comments that it is better to start fresh than to be as the world’s major cities and build your civilization upon bones (not a lot of realization of the fact that he’s not the first settler — uh, Native peoples, Thoreau?).

There’s even a mini-commentary on globalization in the text. Thoreau details those who come to Walden Pond to harvest ice — the ice that is used in India comes from the same spring as does his well water. He is awed by the shrinking globe. He also points out that a bucket of water turns putrid in a matter of hours, but a slab of ice stays sweet forever.

At the end of the text, Thoreau catalogues his experiences and looks fondly upon his first year. He feels great accomplishment at the state of his land, his home, and the tameness of the local animals. He feels accomplished. He leaves us with many thoughts, not the least of which is the importance of realizing the breadth of the world and the options available. He leaves Walden Pond after two years ostensibly to chase other opportunities (though he died of tuberculosis in Concord… so yeah), and worries that when the rest of us build walls and fences we cut ourselves off from those opportunities. He begs us to travel, both in the world and within ourselves, in order to broaden our scope. He asks us to live modestly and, most importantly, begs readers to not think less of themselves because they live now and in America. Not everyone can be a scholar of antiquity, he reminds us. It is better to be a living dog than a dead lion.