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- Author: Laura Dassow Walls
- Full Title: Henry David Thoreau
- Category: #books
- In the act of committing this story to his Journal, Henry made a choice: he would make it true. This choice will set him off from family, friends, and neighbors—unlike them, Henry David Thoreau would be a writer. This meant taking up the writer’s double consciousness, splitting the self who lives from the self who writes, opening up a double vision: present and past, white and Indian, civil and wild, man and nature.
- So at the end of his first entry, Thoreau wrote down what Emerson said: “Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst.” Everything is true through which you become better.2
- His answer is extraordinary, and central to his rebirth: “walking as one” would not mean walking “into” nature, penetrating it on his quest for unity only to drive nature ever farther away, but something far riskier: stopping. Still the mind, open the body, clear the senses. Thoreau called this listening, beyond sound itself: “I was always conscious of sounds in nature which my ears could never hear—that I caught but the prelude to a strain.” To listen truly meant cultivating a new sense, a deeper hearing: “Will not this faith and expectation make to itself ears at length.”
- From the perspective of the woods, Thoreau’s destructive agency was indeed as natural as the lightning and impersonal as the railroad, setting off a course of regeneration that was part of this forest’s normal ecological cycle, clearing away dead leaves and undergrowth, releasing nutrients back into the soil and activating the cycle of regeneration known as forest succession. From that day forward, Thoreau knew a truth few others fully understand: human beings are not separate from nature but fully involved in natural cycles, agents who trigger change and are vulnerable to the changes they trigger.
- For the rest of his life he returned to these same woods relentlessly, over and over again, and what he saw astounded him: “In the spring I burned over a hundred acres till the earth was sere and black—& by mid-summer this space was clad in a fresher & more luxuriant green than the surrounding even. Shall man then despair? Is he not a sproutland too after never so many searings & witherings?”121 Thoreau could never forget that he, too, was a fallen man—he, too, was a son of Adam. And nature, unaccountably and miraculously, forgave him, even when his neighbors would not.
- Their bold experiment collapsed after a mere six weeks.8 No wonder, wrote Charles Lane, still stinging from the collapse of Fruitlands: “The experiment of a true wilderness life by a white person” could be nothing more than an “interesting dream. He is not born for it; he is not natured for it.” For true progress to the soul, one must “look in some other, some new direction.”
- Meanwhile, Thoreau had his own lyceum lecture to finish, two weeks after Phillips’s. His subject, “Concord River,” might seem to escape to nature rather than face the political heat, but Thoreau saw it as a turning toward his larger project, “to do right.” In his view, slavery was not a single cause whose cure would solve everything; rather, it was one symptom of a larger sickness preying on a universe of beings, not all of them human.
- Others have called the shelter on Walden’s shores a cabin, hut, or shanty, but Thoreau almost always called it a house, insisting on the solidity and dignity he worked so hard to attain. As Emerson commented, “Cultivated people cannot live in a shanty.”24 Thoreau’s whole experiment hinged on the distinction. Had he built only a “poet’s lodge” for “the good hours,” his move would have troubled no one; lots of people did that. But spending all his hours there made him a pioneer—not a Western one, but an inward one, “the enterprising and independent thinker, applying his discoveries to his own life.” Outbuildings or vacation retreats only exercised a self already established. Thoreau wanted a house to embody a new self, so that building that house meant building that self, literally from the ground up.
- But why exactly did Thoreau go to Walden Pond? The question still lingers today. On one level, the answer is easy: he went there to write. As Waldo Emerson explained to his brother William, Henry had always had a room of his own, to write, to dream, “and always must.” But now, instead of claiming a little space in a communal house, an alcove or attic, he would claim an entire life, and declare that writing would be not an occasional hobby but the central hub of his whole being. From now on, Thoreau would be a writer in an entirely new sense: instead of living a little, then writing about it, his life would be one single, integrated act of composition.
- Emerson, too, caught something of Thoreau’s larger intent when he pondered how his friend, like his Irish gardener Hugh Whelan, was pocketing “every slip & stone & seed, & planting it.” This was the true writer’s vocation, he thought: “Nothing so sudden, nothing so broad, nothing so subtle, nothing so dear, but it comes therefore commended to his pen, & he will write. In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, & the universe is the possibility of being reported.” Tell Thoreau that some things just cannot be described, and he knew better: he would “report God himself or attempt it.”
- From then on, there would be no casual meetings with Henry T. As word spread, circumstances he hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t control were turning him into a new kind of being, that product of modern commerce and communications: a celebrity. Meeting Thoreau became an Event, the kind of thing one retailed to posterity. As a consequence, all those harmless and loving dinners at home, where he dropped off his laundry, caught up on the news, packed in a good meal, and maybe carried away a pie for breakfast laid him open to endless charges of hypocrisy. No other male American writer has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry. But from the very beginning, such charges have been used to silence Thoreau.
- Walden took shape here, in two key discoveries: First, that the pond had “a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”66 Thoreau’s quest for the “bottom” of the pond was also his quest for a bedrock truth, that face-to-face confrontation with “actuality” that drove him to the pond to begin with. But once you found that bedrock truth, what should you do about it? This was his second discovery: each person’s answer will depend upon, and will reveal, the exact height, breadth, and depth of their individual moral character. The angle intersections inscribed by our particular daily experiences, the coves and inlets of our lives, will ground the decisions we make, our actions in the world. And the sum total of all our moral actions combined will constitute the ethical character of the society we build together.
- Tyler pushed annexation through Congress, which ratified it soon after Polk took office. Emerson was worried—“Mexico will poison us,” he predicted darkly—but Orestes Brownson spoke for the Democratic millions when he proclaimed in John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, “Our new lands are exhausted.”67 America needed more territory. In July 1845, O’Sullivan himself chimed in: only expansion would fulfill America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Manifest Destiny was on the move.
- The furious pages in Thoreau’s Journal suggest what he said that night—the problem lay not with frail humanity but with “institutions,” those “grim and ghostly phantoms like Moloch & Juggernaut because of the blind reverence paid to them.” How ironic that the State, which should protect his freedom, robbed him of it: “When I have asserted the freedom it declared it has imprisoned me.”
- The real question was, how could a good man lend himself to evil? Staples knew Thoreau acted out of principle, not poverty, yet still he locked him up, agreeing to be a tool of the State that was committing one of the worst crimes since time began, “the present Mexican War.” But who had committed this atrocity? All the people Thoreau saw around him were decent and well meaning. Yet daily the crime continued, unhindered. The lesson was, “Any can command him who doth not command himself.”79 Men were acting not like men, but like stones, letting themselves be used as bricks in a wall.
- Why, Thoreau asked Uncle George—still thinking of those immigrant masses—weren’t there more settlers on this land? Because, he replied, the land was not for sale. The companies who owned it wanted no towns on their tax rolls, and the few individuals who’d acquired land wanted no neighbors. People brought nothing but trouble.
- But Thoreau the living person did leave, and in later years the reason puzzled him: “Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back… . Perhaps I wanted a change—There was a little stagnation it may be… . Perhaps if I lived there much longer I might live there forever—One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms.” Perhaps, he added in Walden, he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”116
- A few weeks after he moved back to town, Thoreau wrote proudly to the class of ’37 that he’d lived up to the defiant ideals of his Harvard commencement speech: “I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry… . My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.”
- For as Lyell demonstrated, the greatest of revolutions were caused by the smallest of changes, accumulating through eons to transform the planet: mountains uplifted inch by inch by earthquakes, worn away grain by grain by raindrops. Over and over Thoreau inscribed Lyell’s fundamental insight into his Journal: “We discover the causes of all past change in the present invariable order of the universe.” The present is the key to the past, and to the future as well; the pulse of the universe is beating still.
- Late in 1857, when he was revising Cape Cod, he wrote Blake: “You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.” Here was the paradox: without matter, soul is without life; but to be a soul, embodied, means that only through a mortal body can soul “contact” the world. This experience should be the source of your writing, he told Blake: return to it again and again, until your essay contains all that is important, nothing that is not. This can be done only afterward, at home—for what do we do when we actually reach the mountaintop? We sit down and eat our lunches. “It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do?”10 It would take Thoreau the rest of his life to “go over” this particular mountain, to put on paper what it said and what it did. For a decade he kept returning to Cape Cod. It would be published only after his death.
- The question of genius was on Henry’s mind. Was it something one had? “Men commonly talk as if genius were something proper to an individual. I esteem it but a common privilege & if one does not enjoy it now—he may congratulate his neighbor that he does.”47 No, one didn’t possess genius—but if you lived right, genius might possess you.
- Their minutes recorded (often verbatim) the practical concerns on the minds of Thoreau’s friends and neighbors: how to care for pigs and cattle; how to grow corn and hay, apples and peaches, grapes and cranberries; how to plant gardens, manure the land, get crops to market. Also how to educate children so they would stay on the farm instead of leaving for the cities or the West—education, they agreed, was the key—and how to educate themselves so they could incorporate the latest advances in mathematics, chemistry, geology, plant breeding, and agricultural science. In part they wanted to learn how to adapt Concord’s colonial-era farms to modern industrial agriculture, but they were also eager to care for the land and make Concord a place of great natural beauty, from its gracious yards, treelined streets, and innovative new garden cemetery to its farms, fields, rivers, meadows, and forests.
- Emerson noticed that local farmers who once remarked on Thoreau as an oddity came to admire his deep knowledge of their land.70 When the Concord Farmers’ Club wanted to know where to find native wildflowers to grace Concord’s gardens or native trees to shade its yards and streets, they asked Thoreau. In the late 1850s, as their attention turned to healing Concord’s damaged forests, Thoreau showed them the way.
- Thoreau’s new studies took him deeper and deeper into the field. Emerson noticed that Thoreau read “less in books lately, & more in nature.”72 With good reason: books held no answers for the questions he had started to ask. There wasn’t even a name for this new kind of science. Later generations would call it “plant succession” and honor Thoreau as a pioneer working in the fields of forest management and plant ecology.
- Sunday morning was Quaker meeting, and when someone warned him they all expected him to be moved by the spirit, he prepared a few words, “just enough to set them a little by the ear & make it lively.”
- imagining a turn to nature not as a return to primitivism, but as a contemporary renewal of the deep communal intertwining of nature and culture.
- The insight grew: “The man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you.”