“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in the opening lines of Walden, “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”
I’ve been thinking about Henry David Thoreau and his classic book, Walden, a lot lately. Published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, came out of the Transcendentalist movement, an American literary and philosophical movement with deep roots in New England that lasted from the 1830s to the 1850s.
Transcendentalist writers such as Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated freedom, individualism and belief in The Eternal One. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” Whitman wrote.
The Transcendentalists also believed that every individual carries the universe within. That’s what got me hooked on Thoreau in university when I read Walden for an American literature class. After all these years, it and the sentiments it conveys, remain at the very core of my thinking.
“Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? 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.”
Thoreau’s literary style weaves personal experience, close observation of nature and symbolism with a rich, poetic and philosophical sensibility. To discover life’s true essential needs, he advocates abandoning waste and illusion and living simply.
“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 wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Amid the disarray, turmoil and fear surrounding the Coronavirus, the economy and just about everything else you can think of, the other night, I dug out my old and worn-out copy of Walden. I reread passages that, for almost half a century, have illuminated my thinking and soothed my spirit. Although some of the pages are hard to read because of water smudges, which happened when I dropped the book into the St. John River on a canoe trip four decades ago, it was inspiring, and reassuring, to feel the power of Thoreau’s words again.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
“It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” What wisdom that line contains, and so appropriate for these crazy times.
A few years ago, when I visited Concord, I got up early and, imagining it was 1845, walked the trail around Walden Pond. Standing in the exact spot where Thoreau’s cabin stood, I imagine him stepping out of the door and walking down over the hill to go for a morning swim, the only sound, a few birds singing and a squirrel scurrying through the leaves.
Watching him lope towards the pond, I wonder what he is thinking. Only 28, he is healthy, strong and agile. In 17 years, however, he will die of tuberculosis. Yet, in a life that would last only 44 years, Thoreau will inspire millions, including Tolstoy, Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he will write in Walden, a few years later. “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.”
