Walden (1854)

I got 100 pages in and wanted to stick my head in a vat of boiling water. I HATED this book. I really hated it. How can one man talk so much shite about absolutely nothing? It honestly made me want to set things on fire. Who cares?! Who care about anything this man has to say? He doesn't care what anyone else has to say, so why listen to him? ARGH. ( )

The first American to translate philosophy from India (parts of the Lotus Sutra), Henry David (HD) Thoreau had read that ice was being shipped from America to India, and decided to retreat to a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond, "to live deliberately."

Later, Gandhi had read and was influenced by Thoreau. Later still, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had read and was influenced by Gandhi. Still yet later, kdis in Tiananmen Square, 1989, were quoting Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. So this book is an important genome in the spiral DNA-helix, between east and west. A treasure.

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I read Walden with my environmental history sections last week. Only a couple of them had ever read any Thoreau, although they all had a sense of who he was and what he stood for. It was interesting talking about Walden in a history class, rather than in English, which was where I first encountered Thoreau. I wonder if that led to a greater effort on my part to talk about context—or is that just me?

There were certainly things about Walden that surprised me, and that I had not picked up on when I read it as a teenager. One thing was, the way Thoreau seems to jump back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous. On the same page where he says “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau also says “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave driver of yourself.” Stephen Fender, the editor of the Oxford World Classics edition, apologizes for this passage by saying Thoreau was one of the first critics of the northern factory system. Fender tries hard to put a “free labor” spin on what really amounts to a ridiculous, ignorant, insensitive statement. But I think it’s this middle-class, northern-white-guy ignorance and self-centeredness of Thoreau’s that makes Walden so rich and enduring.

Sure, there are enough literary and cultural references to keep classicists and concordance-writers happy. But is this why we still read Walden? And there are beautiful, graphic passages about nature, and about Thoreau’s experience of the woods and the pond. But I don’t think this accounts for his continuing popularity, either. I think it comes down to two things: Thoreau gives us a view of nineteenth-century America from a perspective way outside the frame; and he’s a white, middle-class, suburban intellectual, like most of us.

It’s very difficult to critique the system from within. By leaving and looking at his society from the outside, Thoreau helps us see things that ought to be obvious, but are not. He reminds us that “the principal object” of the new textile factories is “not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.” Once we’re pulled out of the frame a bit by that thought, Thoreau continues, “In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.” Thoreau keeps reminding us that his perspective is personal and limited. “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross,” Thoreau says. “It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.” But just when you want to hit him upside the head with a 2x4, he concludes the paragraph by saying “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

When he looks at Concord and sees “the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defense,” it’s easy to see that culture of fear playing itself out in our own time. Thoreau is right: “if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with.” The wish to “live deliberately…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” is as contemporary as it could possibly be. Thoreau’s critique only becomes stronger, as we move farther from simplicity. In the end, it may be the ahistorical nature of Walden that has made it so enduring. Marching to the beat of a different drummer and cultivating wildness (a fabulous oxymoron!) are timeless. As opposed to something like Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which was filled with specific recommendations that don’t wear nearly as well, a hundred years later.

But I’m reading Walden with my history class, and for all of that timeless wisdom, I question the historical reality of those “lives of quiet desperation,” even though the statement is intuitive and resonant. I suspect that it’s a projection, both when Thoreau originally said it, and when we read it and nod knowingly. But yeah, there’s something to it…Similarly, the idea that they built a telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas have nothing meaningful to say to each other is a sneering, elitist misrepresentation. There will be a lot of data and facts in my dissertation, but the real meat of the thing will come from thousands of letters that people wrote to family members. They clearly thought they had something meaningful to say to each other, even if it was only “I planted six acres of potatoes” and “How is Mother?” Thoreau doesn’t deign to consider that type of communication worth the penny postage—but that’s his problem. ( )

While I agree with what I've read on principal the majority of this book is pretty dull.

I read Walden in a battered old hardcover, probably a Modern Library Edition, now far out of print, when I was a teen. A long, long while ago, when I was in love with the Transcendalists and seeking some sort of vision for a life well lived. Thoreau has walked with me through the decades of my life, a touchstone, a surly companion, a man who observes the ways of the plants and the weather and the world and does not compromise. Probably if we met in real life we would have hated each other; I get that Henry wasn't that comfortable with women, save the wife of his buddy Emerson and his mom and her cookies. But...you have to love him. And read him. And treasure him. ( )