Did we all spend the first few months of the pandemic contemplating a divorce from the reality of living a work-a-day life and the entanglements of office and personal politics, leaving toxic people and environments behind, embracing a rustic simplicity and an opportunity to listen to that faint voice in the wilderness urging us to live simply and pursue before we die, something truly meaningful in our lives?
Why is it then, that Henry David Thoreau keeps coming to mind as we attempt to come to terms with another year gone, friends lost, lives upended, hopes diminished, and attempt to put a positive spin on the calamity that has embraced the world? Perhaps as we find ourselves estranged from our normal routines we are drawn to Walden Pond because it too is an escape, a fantasy, utterly divorced from "the essential facts of life" as Thoreau would have us believe, and less about "living deliberately" than escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living with other people, at least those with whom we disagree.
As of March 23, 2022 those living in the United States have been living with the isolation of the coronavirus for the same amount of time that Henry David Thoreau spent living at Walden Pond; two years, two months, and two days.
Henry David Thoreau, in the American myth, is our national conscience, the man who set the example when he proclaimed, “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 it came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Who could not help but be drawn in by the simplicity of the desire? Who could not be compelled to toss aside the mundane, rid themselves of entrapments, and stride purposely toward a greater awareness of one's true destiny?
But the American myth it seems, is exactly that; a myth. Poetic as it may seem, Thoreau's cabin in the woods was not as he suggests, “as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers.” His sojourn was more like camping out in the back yard. He could walk to his mother's house in twenty minutes, something he did almost weekly to enjoy her cookies and drop off his laundry. And she in turn, along with his sisters, would walk the short distance to Walden Pond each week to bring him a few of the necessities he claimed to not need. The Concord town church bells echoed through the woods each morning and the commuter train from Concord to Boston sped past on the Fitchburg railroad tracks clipping the corner of Walden Pond barely 1,000 feet to the west of his cabin. Thoreau writes that the men on the trains, "bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often." This is not quite what comes to mind when one thinks of wilderness.
By his own reckoning Thoreau built his own house with a borrowed axe. Actually, he bought an old shanty from James Collins, a penniless Irish immigrant, tore it down and reassembled it on Walden Pond. When he'd had enough of the 'essential facts of living' and faced the impending prospect of enduring another winter bouncing pebbles off a frozen lake, he simply walked back into town and returned to those creature comforts that he claimed to distain, and spent the next ten years writing his book.
This is not to be critical of his choices. Who, given other options, would forsake a warm bed in the comfortable town of Concord for the deprivation of living in a one room shanty on a frozen lake? Thoreau was a Harvard educated man slumming in a woodlot. He was there by choice not necessity and, as we all feel about our imposed isolation two years into this pandemic; enough is enough. But the true circumstances of his implied solitude cast a different light on the man and his many epigrams. His writings are not a daily journal as he might have one believe, but a careful crafting of events conjured ten years hence.
What we find in Walden between the aspiration and reality, amidst the hubris and the sincerity, is everything that we find right, and wrong, with America today. It is both the best of us and the worst of us and this is perhaps why the book continues to resonate. The story of Walden Pond is the story of who we are; an aspirational nation, conflicted. Thoreau's book is widely regarded as American scripture so it's not surprising that when we look at Walden Pond, what we see is our own reflection.
Thoreau, like most of us, was complicated and contradictory. He was an abolitionist who participated in the Underground Railroad but he was not a pacifist as one might assume given his influence on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. with his lecture, 'Civil Disobedience'. He vehemently defended John Brown's violent raid on Harpers Ferry. He spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican American War which he considered an imperialist adventure and an attempt to extend slavery, and because he could not discern a determining moral principle that made the Mexican War necessary or just. His observations on land preservation, animal welfare, and deforestation have inspired the modern environmentalist movement. He criticized much of industrial capitalism as it emerged in the 19th century and reviled the sort of people who were making it happen. One might see corollaries with some current day progressive democrats.
But Thoreau also believed in the primacy of the individual and was concerned with society’s and government’s efforts to subjugate him. "This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way." Reminds me of Ronald Reagan. Thoreau believed that government was necessary but must be carefully limited. He believed that the very nature of government, if not checked by higher law, would cause it to eventually control all aspects of the lives of its citizens. It's not surprising that Thoreau has also been embraced by minimum-government conservatives whose "higher law" often means reshaping the courts and judiciary to reflect conservative fervor and religious principles sometimes masquerading as an "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution.
It is helpful to remember that Thoreau was, by many accounts, a misanthrope; a self centered, egotistical contrarian possessed of a near-religious fervor, and convinced that nature offers better society than humans do. Convinced of his own righteousness and contemptible of what he saw as other's pathetic lives, Thoreau railed against the evils of the industrial revolution, consumerism, immigrants, most forms of government, and rejected social conventions and institutions if they varied from his own sense of how to live his life. In a remembrance of Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson offered this observation from one of Thoreau’s friends: “I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Perhaps in our co-vid isolation we've discovered that Thoreau was at least partially right; we all need our own individual cabin in the woods from time to time in which to retreat from the rest of the world. Perhaps the rural sage of Walden Pond was indeed aware of “an essential fact of life” best summed up by the urban sage of Paris, Jean Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people". Especially those with whom we disagree.
So why do we embrace this man? Walden articulates not only our innermost desires, our longing for a sense of a spiritual connection to the world, an embrace of a simpler more meaningful life, it also highlights a frustration; that we cannot focus on what's really important because our careers, our lives, and obligations fill our days and confirm our exhaustion with a world that seems to crowd out that which is truly important. And Thoreau asks us to look even deeper, to consider even more uncomfortable questions: “How much is enough?”, but more importantly, “How can I hear my own heart?”. Thoreau asks each of us to reflect upon the importance of silence, contemplation, and solitude in our lives; things we've become far too familiar with in our covid isolation.
Thoreau never had to forward any money or incur any debt for the land he farmed, or the lot where he built his house. He simply squatted on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson that was so ill-suited to farming that it had been abandoned to all but the most undesirable tenants. His understanding and sympathy with those who lived there of necessity are nearly non-existent. For a man who deplored the Jeffersonian expansion to the west, terming it a land-grab from Mexico and the Native Americans, he had no problem living at Walden; that land grab twenty miles from Boston had, after all, occurred one hundred years earlier, so that was a different matter. He decried the "No Trespassing" sign he found one morning on his favorite huckleberry patch believing the land should remain part of the common community, yet he made the bulk of his livelihood as a surveyor, measuring, carving up, dividing, and parsing out what once belonged to everyone. To Thoreau, the allure of Walden was that nature was a pristine refuge from the city, a last redoubt of nobility. Thoreau, like John Muir and Madison Grant, went to the woods to escape aspects of humanity. They created and preserved versions of the wild that promised to exclude the human qualities they despised. Ultimately, nature was to him what it was to his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Divine made visible.
Nature gave Thoreau access to a spiritual principle that had been perverted, or covered over, by social-cultural mechanisms. But as a guide to how we might live our lives, Henry David Thoreau sometimes comes across alternately as a cranky old man or an immature adolescent less curious about the world than convinced of his own puritanical righteousness and of the certainty that self discipline and self reliance are the sole requirements for success. Thoreau is both everything that we cherish and all that we distain.
When Thoreau decried the building of dams asking "who will hear when the fishes cry", and denounced the clearing of forests claiming that trees have a consciousness, he was roundly denounced as a nutball. Stewardship of the land, as Thoreau believed was essential, meant recognizing nature as a commons, and everywhere he looked, as woods were felled for profit and hilltops were engulfed by housing projects, Thoreau saw the commons under threat. Now, substitute the word community for commons. Is this what we have lost? The word commons suggests a gathering place to share what we all have in common and Thoreau saw that as under attack, being splintered. What was once common was now being parceled out or claimed as the dominion of the few; Truth, Morality, Objectivity, Integrity, Righteousness. Can a society thrive if there is no shared moral order? The question reverberates today as it did in 1847 when Thoreau left Walden Pond to contemplate his book.
The premise of Walden; to purify one's life, to calculate in dollars and cents, hours and minutes, the exact cost of "the gross necessities of life" - that which is essential to survival - and to rid oneself of the luxuries that complicate men's lives, burdens them financially, binds them to their land, and leaves them exhausted and spiritually empty, and thus provide a space to explore the true work of spiritual fulfillment, is seemingly straightforward and simple. Except that it's not. It seems like the all-American dream. Its universal appeal touches on every conflict and contradiction in American life. Walden is, if nothing else, as conflicted as the American Ideal. What do we have to sacrifice to live in community? What do we have to forfeit if we live without it? What exactly is this social contract that binds us together? This is the lesson of Walden Pond: that our immediate concerns usually obscure the important ones. Perhaps we each need our own Walden Pond - or covid isolation - to come to terms with what is most important in our lives.
There is a cairn of stones at Walden; a monument gathered by devotees one stone at a time, that marks the site of his home. It is a monument designed by no one, built by everyone. It’s been assembled one piece at a time, over time, by individuals who will never meet, but who in their devotion, form a community of souls. It pays homage to the past as it provides hope for the future. Adding a stone is an acknowledgement of those ideals that we share, that also respects those with whom we disagree. Like most cairns it causes us to stop and reorient ourselves, assess where we are and where we're going. During the present crisis that is isolating us perhaps "Walden; or, Life In The Woods" has the potential to not only highlight our differences, but also bring us together.
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March, 2022, Ajijic, Mexico
Bill Sheehan