Walden
Walden is the most well-known of Henry David Thoreau’s books—and he was a prolific writer, especially if you count his voluminous journals. A reflection on simple living in natural surroundings, Walden condenses into one year the two years that Thoreau lived alone in a cabin he built himself next to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, his home town and place of birth, and also death.
I honestly can’t remember when I first read Walden, but I revisited it in late 2019 or early 2020, in audiobook form, which I enjoyed listening to during my work commute down country roads (about thirty minutes each way). I sadly can’t recall who the narrator of that particular audio version was, but he did a fantastic job. For weeks I walked around with his voice-as-Thoreau’s in my head, and I greatly appreciated the company. Thoreau’s prose is exquisite in its interweaving of close observations of nature, personal experience, and pointed rhetoric that displays deeply poetic sensibilities, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He also does not pull his punches and is extremely funny.
David Henry Thoreau was born on July 12th, 1817. He started calling himself Henry David after he finished his studies at Harvard College. Upon graduating, he tried teaching at a public school but resigned after a few weeks because he refused to give corporal punishment to students. In 1838, then twenty-one years old, he opened a progressive grammar school with his older brother John, but the school closed four years later when John died—in Henry’s arms—of tetanus, which he’d contracted when cutting himself while shaving.
At that time in his life, Thoreau was living with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom he’d met a few years prior, through a mutual friend. Emerson introduced Thoreau—fourteen years his junior—to Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. Transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and that people were at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. One of Emerson’s most well-known pieces of writing is his essay “Self Reliance." He and other Transcendentalists emphasized subjective intuition over objective empiricism, but still attempted to embrace or, at least, to not oppose the empiricism of science. And they believed that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters.
From 1841 to 1844, Thoreau worked as a live-in tutor to Emerson’s children, and was also an editorial assistant, repairman, and gardener. In 1844 he returned to Concord and worked at his own family’s pencil factory, which continued to be a source of income for most of his adult life. It was also around this time that he began to feel restless. His friend William Ellery Channing, a Transcendentalist poet introduced to him by Emerson, told Thoreau: "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.”
So that’s what he did. Thoreau started building his Walden cabin in March of 1845, on a plot of land that Emerson owned, and moved into it on July 4th of that year, eight days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday. He stayed there for two years, two months, and two days, making the occasional trips into town and to see the Emersons. He also left Walden for a brief time in August of 1846 and traveled to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in the first part of his book The Maine Woods. He left Walden Pond for good on September 6th, 1847, and moved back in with the Emersons.
Thoreau became more and more fascinated by the natural world and wrote increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of Concord, covering an area of 26 square miles in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He was also a voracious reader of travel and expedition writing. And while he did do some traveling of his own (though never abroad), he largely preferred to "live at home like a traveler.”
Thoreau died on May 6th, 1862. He’d contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, he became ill with bronchitis and his health began to decline, with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Thoreau knew he was dying and chose to spend his time revising and editing his unpublished works, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of others, including Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled.” His last words were "Now comes good sailing,” followed by, "moose" and then “Indian.” He was 44 years old.
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Walden was first published in 1854. Like many now long-revered works, it received little fanfare initially. But in 2004, American author John Updike (one of my favorite writers), wrote in The Guardian: "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become 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.” Updike had a gift for nailing descriptions so precisely as to elicit the purest kind of laughter from his readers—at least this reader—and his referring to Thoreau as “so perfect a crank and hermit saint” is a prime example of that gift in action.
There’s definitely some minutiae that one can skim over here and there in Walden, but all-in-all the writing is so intelligent, vibrant, and musical that only a boring person could be bored by it—or someone who cares nothing for nature, simple living, or being true to oneself. I believe the world would be a much better place if Walden were revered as much as the Bible is.
The first chapter of the book, called “Economy,” begins with Thoreau addressing the need for people to simplify their work lives. He wrote, “Men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.” He was mostly referring to farmers, whom he viewed as slaves to their own farms and houses, made poorer by them instead of richer. But Thoreau, himself not anchored to any house or farm, could be truly independent and “follow the bent of [his] genius.” He used the word “genius” in this way a lot, referring to what Marcus Aurelius might have called his “nature.”
I especially love what Thoreau says about routinized labor. He says it reduces a person to nothing more than a machine, and he asks, “How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?” Already, in these first few pages of Walden, he’s plumbing profound notions of consciousness. He’s suggesting that when people don’t contact their own ignorance, they can’t grow—and of course he means “grow” in a spiritual and intellectual sense. This concept is very reminiscent of J. Krishnamurti, whom I wrote about in my last blog post. Or I guess I should say that Krishnamurti’s ideas about consciousness and knowledge are reminiscent of Thoreau’s, since Thoreau had been dead for 33 years before Krishnamurti was even born. In saying that a person must “remember their ignorance” in order to grow, Thoreau foreshadows Krishnamurti saying that we must essentially forget what we know, or recognize that all knowledge is old and therefore based in the past and therefore not relevant to what the present moment has to offer, in order to awaken real intelligence. When Thoreau says that the laboring man “has so often to use his knowledge,” he means that such a man must draw on the same set of knowledge day in and day out to complete the same tasks, and in this way the bulk of his life is wasted on already-known things and experiences. There is not time or space available for discovering what he doesn’t know. Thoreau quotes Confucius, who said, “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”
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While Thoreau believed that people in our society work too much at certain jobs—namely the ones we get paid for—and said that we “exaggerate the importance of what work we do,” he also marveled at how much we don’t do. We “systematically shirk,” he said, any labor that is necessary for a human being, thereby “defrauding [ourselves] of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.” So after a day’s worth of essentially meaningless work, the leisure we do obtain is “ignoble and unprofitable.” He applies this idea to students, too, calling academia an “expensive game” in which young people “play at life” or merely study it, instead of actually living it, or “trying the experiment of living.”
One of the duties that Thoreau extols as necessary to human life is the building of one’s own house. I’m sure that Helen and Scott Nearing—revolutionary homesteaders starting in the 1930s, and writers of a book called The Good Life, which contains a detailed chapter called “We Build a Stone House”—read Walden and took much inspiration from what Thoreau had to say about this topic in particular. He compared a person building their own house to a bird building its own nest, asking, “Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands…the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” But instead, he said, we “resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter.” He wonders where it will end, the seemingly ceaseless division of labor that characterizes our economic system, and he’s at a loss to say what purpose such division ultimately serves.
Join me in imagining, won’t you, what it would be like if everyone had to build their own house! Dwellings would probably be smaller, for one thing, and like Thoreau, people would be able to “tell exactly what their houses cost, and the separate cost of the various materials which compose them.” He spent 28 dollars and 12 and a half cents on his Walden house, the equivalent of roughly $1000 today. If people built their own houses—as opposed to paying contractors to do the work, not as opposed to buying an already-built house—they’d probably be less likely to move, and houses would probably stay within the same family for generation after generation. And people would need to take time off from their other jobs—the ones where they “so often use [their] knowledge” in order to accomplish the important task of building their home, so they can “remember well [their] ignorance,” and therefore evolve. We would necessarily have to stop exaggerating the importance of our day jobs, and consequently probably experience less of the “anxiety and strain” that Thoreau called “a well-nigh incurable form of disease.” If we worked less for money and more for the actual necessities of life, we might learn to be content with fewer luxuries. “A man is rich,” Thoreau said, "in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Of course I realize that people are not going to build their own houses. But one thing that many of us could realistically do more of is cook our own meals and grow our own food. Based on his experience of relatively self-sufficient living at Walden Pond, Thoreau asserts that “it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food” and “that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.” We’ve become rather obsessed with having variety in our diet, haven’t we? We’ve taken it to the extreme of fetishizing food. This isn’t to disparage people who genuinely enjoy getting artistic in the kitchen. I myself enjoy that sometimes, but until recently I felt an internal pressure to approach cooking in that way on a regular basis. But thanks to having recently reread the aforementioned book The Good Life, I’ve been inspired to simplify my dinner repertoire, which is now essentially a random rotation of salad, pasta, rice and beans, omelettes, roasted vegetables, and some kind of soup, stew, or chili, with the occasional adventurous recipe or classic lasagna thrown in. I have given myself permission to be relatively rudimentary, and it feels liberating.
Regarding cooking as a form of necessary work, Thoreau, in his discussion of charity, which I’ll get to soon, writes about how some people “show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens,” and he asks, “Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there?” Today, instead of employing people in our kitchens, we eat in restaurants, get take-out or drive-through or something frozen at the grocery store. I appreciate a good restaurant as much as the next guy, but like everything else in this society we’ve gone way too far with it. We don’t need a fraction of as many restaurants as we currently have in this country, and we don’t need any fast food ones. While I’m at it, I’ll say that we should just stop making the majority of what fills most grocery store shelves and freezers.
What if Whole Foods actually only sold whole foods, and other stores did the same? Nothing processed. So many interconnected parts of our society would be different. What would people do for work, you might ask, without food processing plants or truck driving companies to employ them? I don’t know. Maybe they would have jobs they actually enjoyed, that actually enriched their lives instead of lined the pockets of corporate executives. See, we’ve relinquished so much meaningful work—like building our own homes and cooking our own meals and growing our own food, and even washing our own dishes and clothes—so that we can do work that isn’t meaningful at all, or is only meaningful inasmuch as it allows us to put food on the table. Never mind that much of that food is overly processed or otherwise alien to us—alien because we have no real connection to it, don’t really know where it came from, and how.
Instead of viewing necessary, human-making work as inconvenient drudgery to be rushed through—why should we wait ten minutes to warm our soup on the stove when a microwave can do it in one, we say, but what are we doing with those nine minutes? what are we doing with the time it would take to wash dishes by hand or bake our own bread?—it’s like Erich Fromm says in The Art of Loving: basically, we don’t know what to do with all the time we save, but kill it, to which Henry David Thoreau would say, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Anyway, instead of having that attitude about the necessary work of human life, I just wish we could be like old H.D. and say, looking back, “I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it.”
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My buddy H.D. says the most beautiful things, like, “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.” One of the ways we don’t treat ourselves “thus tenderly” (I love those two words together) is by working too hard at meaningless jobs. Another way, which Thoreau touches on, is by just generally being jerks to ourselves. He says, “Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” Most people walk around with low self-esteem, and I’d say that it’s usually because they’re not doing esteem-able things. Which is not to say they’re being lazy or selfish. It might even mean that they could stand to be more selfish, if we don’t define selfish as it’s usually defined. There is such a thing as sacred selfishness…
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I first want to talk about Thoreau’s ideas on charity. Being charitable is one way that people try to treat others “thus tenderly,” and also, you might say, an attempt at doing something esteem-able. But in Walden, Thoreau rails against the concept of what he calls “Doing-good”—that’s hyphenated, with a capital D—and says that that profession is full. He makes an exception for people who “have a genius for charity,” meaning that they do it with their “whole heart and soul and life,” but he himself did not possess that particular sort of genius. His genius was obviously in the realm of self-expression and -reliance, and of loving the natural world. We don’t expect all people to have a genius for those things, right? So why should we expect them to have a genius for charity? But we do have that expectation. Thoreau says, “Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.”
I can’t quite tell what he means by selfishness in this case, but if I had to guess I’d say maybe it relates to another of my favorite lines from Walden: “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” And he staid, “not to be an overseer of the poor, but to become one of the worthies of the world.” So it seems like he’s suggesting that it’s selfish of anyone to expect anyone else to improve the world, and that instead we should all just try to be worthy of it in the first place. Wow.
Philanthropy certainly is an objective rife with disingenuousness. Thoreau might have appreciated our modern term of “virtue signaling” to describe this phenomenon. He said that when people try to do good, they are tainting goodness itself. Any goodness a person does should be “aside from [their] main path, and for the most part wholly unintended.” This reminds me of something Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the smash hit long-time best-seller Eat Pray Love, says in her more recent nonfiction book about creativity called Big Magic. She says that writers—and other artists, I’m sure—should never write with the intention of helping their readers, and that if she knew that something was written with that intention, she wouldn’t want to read it. Similarly, Thoreau says, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
Ah—so maybe that’s what he means by selfish. In trying to “do good” for people, the do-gooder is determining what’s good, i.e. what he thinks other people should have, think, feel, experience. This is why most people, I’d venture to say, don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on their door. It’s why they say that advice that isn’t asked for, isn’t advice.
But back to the idea of goodness being unintentional: Just as we can’t expect everyone to have a genius for painting or poetry or quantum physics, we can’t expect everyone to have a genius for charity. But if we could trust people—including children (remember the blog post about Summerhill? our entire education system would have to radically change) to follow their own interests, and to therefore develop their own unique “genius,” their reason for being in this world— or what makes them worthy of it—then I suspect that goodness would inevitably result. Reading Thoreau, for example, feels like receiving a gift. It feels like sacred medicine. It feels deeply helpful, if you will. But he did not write it with such intentions. He wrote it because he wanted to, because he enjoyed it, because that is where his genius led him. And just as he did not hold himself to anyone’s standards but his own, he did not hold others to his standards. “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account,” he said, “for I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.”
These days people are probably far more prone to pursue the way of their neighbors than they were in the 1850s, because we are so much more privy to what those ways are, thanks to social media. Thoreau would no doubt be appalled by how little people think for themselves in our modern age. This even goes back to the whole division of labor thing. Just as we resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter, we’ve resigned the pleasure of thinking to Google.
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Another aspect of society that Thoreau had a lot to say about in Walden was “the insane ambition [of nations] to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.” He was referring in particular to monuments, which is obviously still a relevant topic today, given the recent debates over Confederate monuments. I think it’s safe to say that Thoreau would be all for the destruction of such statues, obelisks, and the like, both because he was against slavery—a lifelong abolitionist, his philosophy of civil disobedience influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and because he believed it was mere trifling to even build such monuments in the first place. He wished that people took "equal pains to smooth and polish their manners,” and said that “one piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.” He said the Bhagavad Gita, which I’ll talk about in a couple weeks on the show, was “much more admirable than all the ruins of the East!” He even derided the Egyptian pyramids as having “nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for an ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”
Damn. That’s the kind of writing I was referencing earlier when I said that Thoreau didn’t pull his punches. Maybe we should add the Pyramids to our list of monuments to destroy.
Funnily enough, there’s a bronze statue of Thoreau, next to a replica of his cabin, at Walden Pond today. How he would have hated that! And in the photo there appears to be a paved road right behind the cabin, with the pond just beyond, through some trees. He would have hated that paved road, too. He hated the railroad, for crying out loud. Why anyone would need to travel anywhere at thirty miles per hour was beyond him. What’s the hurry? So he definitely would’ve hated cars. And airplanes. And the space program. And I’ll also just add that he hated the post office, and newspapers. Regarding the former, he said, “I think that there are very few important communications made through it.” Imagine what he would think of email and text messaging and, again, social media! Constant communication! Regarding newspapers, he said, “I am sure that I never read any memorable news in them.” He said that most news stories are variations on a small set of common themes; to hear it once is enough. “If you are acquainted with the principle,” he said, “what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?” We care a lot, H.D. We are a culture bombarded by, and addicted to, constant news. You hate newspapers? Try the radio. Television. The internet. Smartphones.
If only all we had were newspapers! Could we just go back to that? Enough with the news already. I wish we could at least just have one news-free day a week. It would be against the rules to print or otherwise disseminate news of any kind on this day. And while we’re at it we could have a no-driving day and a no-flying day. It could make a big difference and it wouldn’t have to be that hard. As Thoreau says in Walden, “Man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.”
So little has been tried. It’s true. Yes, we have accomplished unbelievable feats as a species. We are insanely smart. And yet, to quote comedian David Cross, “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t put a man in an apartment.” We can build pyramids, but we can’t grow our own tomatoes. We invented the internet, but we can’t get along with each other. We are miracles surrounded by miracles everywhere, but we’re unhappy. And so little has been tried. But Thoreau tried. “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.” He was a true philosopher, which he defined as “not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
I wonder if Thoreau had a strong Saturn in his astrological birth chart. I myself am very Saturnian, which makes me very practical, and I therefore admire how unwavering Thoreau is in his practicality. We live very impractical lives, if you think about it. We believe we would be giving something up by living more simply—but we might be sorely mistaken about that. Limits can be good. Freedom does not mean getting to do whatever you want whenever you want. It means being content with less, and confident in your ability to get resourceful and creative and to respond with expertise to whatever the moment presents. And it means that, like Thoreau, you are not afraid of death. That is the ultimate freedom. Because maybe we’re mistaken about death, too, and maybe Walt Whitman—Thoreau’s contemporary—was onto something when he wrote, "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."
Fun fact: Thoreau and Whitman hung out once, at Walt’s mom’s house. Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May, who would go on to write Little Women) was also there. As the story goes, Whitman talked about himself the whole time, and he argued with Thoreau about the virtues of the common man. But upon later reading Leaves of Grass, Thoreau determined that any bragging Whitman did was perfectly warranted. He himself was no stranger to boasting, but in Walden, he writes, “My excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.” Yes. I’m sure Whitman would agree. Someone can be an imperfect human being and still speak Truth. As for what Whitman had to say about Thoreau: “He was a force… His dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame. One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me. I refer to his lawlessness, his dissent, his going his own road… He was always doing things of the plain sort—without fuss. I liked all that about him.”
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The second chapter of Walden, titled “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” contains one of the most beautiful—and psychedelic—passages in the whole book: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he writes. “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.”
There’s a lot going on there. In comparing Time to a stream that he fishes in and drinks from, and commenting on how shallow it is and how “its thin current slides away,” he’s addressing his own mortality. And yet he’s also suggesting that everything is in a state of constant change. A stream is not a static thing, because the water is always moving, renewing itself. I’m reminded of how writer, theologian, and Buddhist teacher Alan Watts, in one of his many public lectures, compared a human being to a whirlpool. You can go to the same stream day after day and see what looks like the same whirlpool in the same place, but it isn’t the same whirlpool at all. And that is how we people are. And in this constant change lies the stuff of eternity. Death is but another example of this change—not an end, but a transformation. When Thoreau says, “I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars,” I assume he means that he would like to drink deeper—to contact the eternity that he himself contains, as we all do—so deep, in fact, that the stream converges—becomes one with—the starry sky that it reflects, and in seeing this oneness in everything, Thoreau is awestruck—mind-blown, if you will—in that he cannot quantify the immensity of life, of existence—“I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet.” So here he is “remembering well his ignorance.” His knowledge of numbers and letters and all the rest of it is meaningless. I’m reminded of Shannon Lay’s song “Awaken and Allow,” wherein she sings, “The more I learned, the less I knew.” Perhaps she would empathize with Thoreau’s having “always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” We all come into this world with the unlearned wisdom of eternity and our connection to it.
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Thus far I’ve only addressed the first two chapters of Walden, so I will need to do at least one sequel blog on the book some time in the future. I could probably devote an entire post to Thoreau’s “Conclusion” chapter alone.
Until then, I will leave you with a couple straggling lines from chapter one that I couldn’t quite fit into earlier parts of my reflection. First: “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” And Thoreau isn’t solely referring to racism, sexism, and the like. He’s talking about all ways of thinking and behaving whose functionality and practicality are not proven, or otherwise based in truth. We have choices as to how to think and how to act. Just because we have always thought or acted a certain way doesn’t mean we must always think or act that way. To quote an old friend of my husband’s, “Happiness is making available choices.” And to quote Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, “We shall never again be as we were.” Ideally, our experiences will change us. People tend to view changing one’s mind about something as indicative of some kind of weakness, or of not standing firm enough in one’s beliefs. But the ability to change our minds, or “give up our prejudices,” can actually be a superpower, and proof of great wisdom and maturity.
I’d say the same for the ability to define success for oneself. Thoreau said, “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” Why, indeed? And why should we let anyone but ourselves decide if we’re successful or not in the first place? What if the depth of one’s gratitude were what we measured success by? Or one’s ability to be emotionally vulnerable in relationship? To express joy without a hint of shame? To apologize with grace and humility when the situation requires it, and to be unapologetic when the situation requires it? To sit in silence and stillness for long periods of time without reaching for the cell phone or some other of our inventions that Thoreau would call “pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things”?
And serious does not have to mean unpleasant or boring. And of course, it’s important not to take this life too seriously, but if Thoreau teaches us nothing else, it’s that we tend to over-emphasize what isn’t important at the expense of what actually gives life meaning.
