On Independence Day 1845, an idealistic young American (Thoreau was just 28) turned his back on what he saw as his country’s depressing materialism, its commercial and industrial soullessness and took himself off to a life of solitude in a country cabin near Walden Pond, just outside Concord, Massachusetts. In his famous account of this experiment, Thoreau later wrote:
“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 the marrow out 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.”
These were not just any old woods, but property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great transcendentalist and intellectual guru to some of the most creative minds of mid-19th-century America and himself a passionate advocate of “solitude”. Whatever the influences on Thoreau, his account of his two-year stay on the northern shore of the pond has become the classic American statement of personal liberation, an ecstatic rendering of spiritual individuality and a hymn to the natural world: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” As the critic Jay Parini has written: “Thoreau defines American independence.”
Thoreau shared with his fellow transcendentalists (who, as well as Emerson, included Amos Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker and Jones Very) a deep concern for the decline of “integrity” in American society. For these seekers after truth, “the woods” became, like “the greenwood” in Merrie England, the place where an individual could truly savour the mysteries of life, free from the restricting conformities of church and state. Where most of his American neighbours were striving to acquire things, Thoreau wanted to dispossess them:
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.”
In the cultivation of the unfettered self, Thoreau believed he was getting closer to the core of existence and doing this, American-style, on his own terms. Rarely has a writer been less biddable. “If I knew for certain,” he writes in Walden, “that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” Thoreau is at pains to insist that each reader of his book “be very careful to find out and pursue his own way”.
Having left behind a world in which, famously, he had witnessed so many men and women leading “lives of quiet desperation”, Thoreau was determined to live “deliberately” for himself. In Walden, he takes the 26 months he spent on Walden Pond and constructs a narrative of his ennobling solitude, in chapters such as Economy, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, The Bean Field, The Ponds and House Warming. In addition to recording his interior life, Thoreau is a devout observer of the landscape in terms that recall, among others, the reportage of Daniel Defoe in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724):
“Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented.”
However, the uncompromising transcendental message of these first chapters gets rather blurred in the middle of the book. For instance, in Visitors, it’s clear that Thoreau in the woods has become, locally, an object of great curiosity. His solitary cabin boasted just three chairs, but he writes:
“I have had 25 or 30 souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near one another.”
Faced with such distractions, Thoreau developed an effective means of diverting gawkers and thrill-seekers from his cabin:
“Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper.”
At the end of this chapter, in one enigmatic paragraph raising as many questions as answers, he describes his most “cheering visitors”:
“Children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with, – “Welcome, Englishmen! Welcome, Englishmen!” for I had had communication with that race.”
Walden also conceals a dramatic interlude, which Thoreau chooses not to elaborate on: his arrest for non-payment of poll tax, an episode alluded to in the chapter entitled The Village. As a result of this, he composed a lecture entitled The Relation of the Individual to the State, which eventually became his essay Civil Disobedience. This is a strong contender for the most celebrated essay in American prose, especially since Gandhi used it to support non-violent resistance in India and Africa and Martin Luther King quoted its arguments during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
This strange outcome of Thoreau’s self-sequestration in the Concord woods is just one of the many unintended consequences derived from the great tradition of Anglo-American literature devoted to the questions of freedom and individuality. Elsewhere, as John Updike noted, Walden became imprisoned in its reputation as a classic: “Such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”
A signature sentence
“It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilisation, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries.”
Three to compare
Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968)
Annie Dillard: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (1974)
Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard (1978)
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