http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum
On the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.
Two days later, a
thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod,
got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When
he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those
victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby
hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since
some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck
repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of
children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin.
The visitor from
Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. “On the whole,” he wrote,
“it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one
body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more.
I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these
poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why
waste any time in awe or pity?” This impassive witness also had stern words for
those who, undone by the tragedy, could no longer enjoy strolling along the
beach. Surely, he admonished, “its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and
it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.”
Who was this
cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not
with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm? This was Henry David
Thoreau, that great partisan of the pond, describing his visit to Cohasset in
“Cape Cod.” That book is not particularly well known today, but if Thoreau’s
chilly tone in it seems surprising, it is because, in a curious way, “Walden”
is not well known, either. Like many canonized works, it is more revered than
read, so it exists for most people only as a dim impression retained from
adolescence or as the source of a few famous lines: “I went to the woods
because I wished to live deliberately.” “If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
Extracted from their
contexts, such declarations read like the text on inspirational posters or
quote-a-day calendars—purposes to which they are routinely put. Together with
the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by
which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become
simplified and inspirational. In that image, Thoreau is our national
conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to
ourselves and to live in harmony with nature.
This vision cannot
survive any serious reading of “Walden.” The real Thoreau was, in the fullest
sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control,
adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the
world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is
deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an
eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But “Walden”
is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin
porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the
woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and
responsibilities of living among other people.
Henry David Thoreau
was born David Henry Thoreau, in 1817, the third of four children of a pencil
manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, which
he did not particularly like and where he was not found particularly likable.
(One classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction,” like a man “preparing
to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their
importance.”) After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher, then helped run a
school until its co-director, his older brother John, died of tetanus. That was
the end of Thoreau’s experiments in pedagogy, except perhaps on the page. On
and off from then until his own death (at forty-four, of tuberculosis), he
worked as a surveyor and in the family pencil factory.
Meanwhile, however,
Thoreau had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fellow Concord resident fourteen years
his senior. Intellectually as well as practically, Emerson’s influence on
Thoreau was enormous. He introduced the younger man to transcendentalism,
steered him toward writing, employed him as a jack-of-all-trades and live-in
tutor to his children, and lent him the pond-side land where Thoreau went to
live on July 4, 1845. Thoreau spent two years at Walden but nearly ten years
writing “Walden,” which was published, in 1854, to middling critical and
popular acclaim; it took five more years for the initial print run, of two thousand
copies, to sell out. Only after Thoreau’s death, in 1862, and thanks to
vigorous championing by his family members, Emerson, and later readers, did
“Walden” become a cornerstone work of American nonfiction and its author an
American hero.
Thoreau went to
Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”:
whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from
savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put
differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a
condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted
Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to
live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the
things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In
“Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.
As it turns out, very
little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community,
tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed
as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in
life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions
were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into
soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of
nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of
being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this
slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by
denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his
soul.
“Walden,” in
consequence, is not a paean to living simply; it is a paean to living purely, with all
the moral judgment that the word implies. In its first chapter, “Economy,”
Thoreau lays out a program of abstinence so thoroughgoing as to make the Dalai
Lama look like a Kardashian. (That chapter must be one of the highest barriers
to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than
eighty pages long.) Thoreau, who never wed, regarded “sensuality” as a
dangerous contaminant, by which we “stain and pollute one another.” He did not
smoke and avoided eating meat. He shunned alcohol, although with scarcely more
horror than he shunned every beverage except water: “Think of dashing the hopes
of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!
Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!” Such temptations, along with the
dangerous intoxicant that is music, had, he felt, caused the fall of Greece and
Rome.
I cannot idolize
anyone who opposes coffee (especially if the objection is that it erodes great
civilizations; had the man not heard of the Enlightenment?), but Thoreau never
met an appetite too innocuous to denounce. He condemned those who gathered
cranberries for jam (“So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie
grass”) and regarded salt as “that grossest of groceries”; if he did without
it, he boasted, he could also drink less water. He advised his readers to eat
just one meal a day, partly to avoid having to earn additional money for food
but also because the act of eating bordered, for him, on an ethical
transgression. “The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our
appetites,” he wrote, as if our appetites were otherwise disgraceful. No slouch
at public shaming, Thoreau did his part to sustain that irrational equation, so
robust in America, between eating habits and moral worth.
Food was bad, drink
was bad, even shelter was suspect, and Thoreau advised keeping it to a minimum.
“I used to see a large box by the railroad,” he wrote in “Walden,” “six feet
long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night”:
drill a few airholes, he argued, and one of these would make a fine home. (“I
am far from jesting,” he added, unnecessarily. Thoreau regarded humor as he
regarded salt, and did without.) He chose to live in a somewhat larger box at
Walden, but austerity prevailed there, too. He eschewed curtains and recoiled
in dismay from the idea of a doormat: “As I had no room to spare within the
house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it,
preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the
beginnings of evil.”
I am not aware of
any theology which holds that the road to Hell is paved with doormats, but
Thoreau, in fine Puritan fashion, saw the beginnings of evil everywhere. He
contemplated gathering the wild herbs around Walden to sell in Concord but
concluded that “I should probably be on my way to the devil.” He permitted
himself to plant beans, but cautiously, calling it “a rare amusement, which,
continued too long, might have become a dissipation.” Only those with no sense
of balance must live in so much fear of the slippery slope. Robert Louis
Stevenson, writing about Thoreau in 1880, pointed out that when a man must
“abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably
use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we
recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than
sickness itself.”
To abstain,
Stevenson understood, is not necessarily to simplify; restrictions and
repudiations can just as easily complicate one’s life. (Try going out to dinner
with a vegan who is avoiding gluten.) But worse than Thoreau’s radical
self-denial is his denial of others. The most telling thing he purports to
abstain from while at Walden is companionship, which he regards as at best a
time-consuming annoyance, at worst a threat to his mortal soul. For Thoreau, in
other words, his fellow-humans had the same moral status as doormats.
No feature of the
natural landscape is more humble than a pond, but, on the evidence of Thoreau,
the quality is not contagious. He despised his admirers, toward whom, Emerson
wrote, he “was never affectionate, but superior, didactic,—scorning their petty
ways.” He disdained his ostensible friends, once responding to a social
invitation with the words “such are my
engagements to myself, that I dare
not promise.” (The italics are his.) And he looked down on his entire town.
“What does our Concord culture amount to?” he asked in “Walden.” “Our reading,
our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of
pygmies and manikins.”
This comprehensive
arrogance is captured in one of Thoreau’s most famous lines: “The mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is a mystery to me how a claim so
simultaneously insufferable and absurd ever entered the canon of popular
quotations. Had Thoreau broadened it to include himself, it would be less
obnoxious; had he broadened it to include everyone (à la Sartre), it would be
more defensible. As it stands, however, Thoreau’s declaration is at once
off-putting and empirically dubious. By what method, one wonders, could a man
so disinclined to get to know other people substantiate an allegation about the
majority of humanity?
By none, of course;
Thoreau could not have been less interested in how the mass of men actually
lived. On the contrary, he was as parochial as he was egotistical. (He once
claimed that Massachusetts contained almost all the important plants in
America, and, after reading the explorer Elisha Kane’s best-selling 1856
account of his Arctic journey, remarked that “most of the phenomena noted might
be observed in Concord.”) His attitude toward Europe “almost reached contempt,”
Emerson wrote, while “the other side of the globe” was, in Thoreau’s words,
“barbarous and unhealthy.” Making a virtue of his incuriosity, he discouraged
the reading of newspapers. “I am sure,” he wrote in “Walden,” “that I never
read any memorable news in a newspaper,” not least because “nothing new does
ever happen in foreign parts.” In that sweeping claim, he explicitly included
the French Revolution.
Unsurprisingly, this
thoroughgoing misanthrope did not care to help other people. “I confess that I
have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises,” Thoreau wrote
in “Walden.” He had “tried it fairly” and was “satisfied that it does not agree
with my constitution.” Nor did spontaneous generosity: “I require of a visitor
that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in
the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests.” In what is by
now a grand American tradition, Thoreau justified his own parsimony by
impugning the needy. “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is
dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his
misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it.”
Thinking of that state of affairs, Thoreau writes, “I began to pity myself, and
I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a
whole slop-shop on him.”
The poor, the rich,
his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity
even encompassed the very idea of civilization. In his journals, he laments the
archeological wealth of Great Britain and gives thanks that in New England “we
have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former
civilization.” That is patently untrue, but it is also telling: for Thoreau,
civilization was a contaminant. “Deliver me from a city built on the site of a
more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries,” he
wrote in “Walden.” “The soil is blanched and accursed there.” Seen by these
lights, Thoreau’s retreat at Walden was a desperate compromise. What he really
wanted was to be Adam, before Eve—to be the first human, unsullied, utterly
alone in his Eden.
There is a striking
exception to Thoreau’s indifference to the rest of humanity, and he is rightly
famous for it. An outspoken abolitionist, he condemned the Fugitive Slave Law,
served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, championed John Brown’s raid
on Harper’s Ferry, and refused to pay the poll tax in Massachusetts, partly on
the ground that it sustained the institution of slavery. (One wonders how he
would have learned about the law, the raid, or any of the rest without a
newspaper, but never mind.) That institution was and remains the central moral
and political crisis of American history, and much of Thoreau’s status stems
from his absolute opposition to it.
But one may reach
good ends by bad means, and Thoreau did. “Not a particle of respect had he to
the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself,”
Emerson wrote of Thoreau. He meant it as praise, but the trouble with that
position—and the deepest of all the troubles disturbing the waters of
“Walden”—is that it assumes that Thoreau had some better way of discerning the
truth than other people did.
Thoreau, for one,
did assume that. Like his fellow-transcendentalists, he was suspicious of
tradition and institutions, and regarded personal intuition and direct
revelation as superior foundations for both spiritual and secular beliefs.
Unlike his fellow-transcendentalists, he also regarded his own particular
intuitions and revelations as superior to those of other people. “Sometimes,
when I compare myself with other men,” he wrote in “Walden,” “it seems as if I
were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious
of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not,
and were especially guided and guarded.”
Claiming special
guidance by the gods is the posture of the prophet: of one who believes himself
in possession of revealed truth and therefore entitled—indeed, obliged—to
enlighten others. Thoreau, comfortable with that posture, sneered at those who
were not. (“They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families—damn
them!”) But prophecy makes for poor political philosophy, for at least two
reasons.
The first concerns
the problem of fallibility. In “Resistance to Civil Government” (better known
today as “Civil Disobedience”), Thoreau argued that his only political
obligation was “to do at any time what I think right.” When constrained by its
context, that line is compelling; it reads as a call to obey one’s conscience
over and above unjust laws. But as a broader theory of governance, which it
was, it is troubling. People routinely perpetrate wrongs out of obedience to
their conscience, even in situations when the law mandates better behavior.
(Consider the Kentucky county clerk currently refusing to issue marriage
licenses to gay couples.) Like public institutions, private moral compasses can
err, and different ones frequently point in different directions. And, as the
scholar Vincent Buranelli noted in a 1957 critique of Thoreau, “antagonism is
never worse than when it involves two men each of whom is convinced that he
speaks for goodness and rectitude.” It is the point of democracy to adjudicate
among such conflicting claims through some means other than fiat or force, but
Thoreau was not interested in that process.
Nor was he
interested in subjecting his claims to logical scrutiny. And that is the second
problem with basing one’s beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation:
it justifies the substitution of anecdote and authority for evidence and
reason. The result, in “Walden,” is an unnavigable thicket of contradiction and
caprice. At one moment, Thoreau fulminates against the railroad, “that devilish
Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town”; in the next,
he claims that he is “refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles
past me.” At one moment, he argues that earlier civilizations are worthless; in
the next, he combines a kids-today crankiness with nostalgia for the imagined
superiority of the past. (“Husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued
with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us.”) On the subject of employment,
“Walden” reads sometimes like “The 4-Hour Workweek” and sometimes like the
collected sermons of John Calvin. Thoreau denigrates labor, praises leisure,
and claims that he can earn his living for the month in a matter of days, only
to turn around and write that “from exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth
ignorance and sensuality.” So incoherent is his treatment of economics that E.
B. White, otherwise a fan, wrote that Thoreau “rides into the subject at top
speed, shooting in all directions.” No one and nothing emerges unscathed, least
of all the author.
Emerson famously
counselled against maintaining a foolish consistency, but Thoreau managed to
get it wrong in both directions. His behavioral prescriptions are so foolishly
inconsistent as to defy all attempts at reconciliation, while his moral
sensibility is so foolishly consistent as to be naïve and cruel. (For one
thing, Thoreau never understood that life itself is not consistent—that what
worked for a well-off Harvard-educated man without dependents or obligations
might not make an ideal universal code.) Those failings are ethical and
intellectual, but they are also political. To reject all certainties but one’s
own is the behavior of a zealot; to issue contradictory decrees based on private
whim is that of a despot.
This is not the
stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were
libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued
self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and
suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and
he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which
governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That
government is best which governs not at all.”
Yet for a man who
believed in governance solely by conscience, his own was frighteningly narrow.
Thoreau had no understanding whatsoever of poverty and consistently
romanticized it. (“Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion
as they are poor.”) His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from
compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so
blatantly violated his belief in self-governance. Indeed, when abolition was
pitted against rugged individualism, the latter proved his higher priority. “I
sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say,” he writes in
“Walden,” “as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude
called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave
both North and South. 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.”
A nation composed
entirely of rugged individualists—so stinting that they had almost no needs, so
solitary that those needs never conflicted with those of their
compatriots—would not, it is true, need much governance. But such a nation has
never existed, and even if nothing else militated against Thoreau’s political
vision its impossibility alone would suffice. As the philosopher Avishai
Margalit once put it (not apropos of Thoreau, though apropos of the similarly
unachievable position of absolute stoicism), “I consider not being an option as
being, in a way, enough of an argument.” So perhaps a sufficient argument
against Thoreau is that, although he never admitted it, the life he prescribed
was not an option even for him.
Only by elastic
measures can “Walden” be regarded as nonfiction. Read charitably, it is a kind
of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David
Thoreau. Read less charitably, it is akin to those recent best-selling memoirs
whose authors turn out to have fabricated large portions of their stories. It
is widely acknowledged that, to craft a tidier narrative, Thoreau condensed his
twenty-six months at the cabin into a single calendar year. But that is the
least of the liberties he takes with the facts, and the most forgivable of his
manipulations of our experience as readers. The book is subtitled “Life in the
Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the
story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with
wilderness and solitude.
In reality, Walden
Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous
society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along
its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers,
while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. Thoreau could
stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about
as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand
Central Terminal. He made that walk several times a week, lured by his mother’s
cookies or the chance to dine with friends. These facts he glosses over in
“Walden,” despite detailing with otherwise skinflint precision his eating
habits and expenditures. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother
and sisters (who brought along more undocumented food) and downplays the fact
that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a
time. This is the situation Thoreau summed up by saying, “For the most part it
is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as
New England. . . . At night there was never a traveller passed
my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man.”
Does this
disingenuousness matter? Countless Thoreau fans have argued that it span
id="incorrect">is</span>does not, quoting by way of defense
his own claim that “solitude is not measured by the miles of space that
intervene between a man and his fellows.” But, as the science writer David
Quammen pointed out in a 1988 essay on Thoreau (before going on to pardon him),
many kinds of solitude are measured in miles. Only someone who had never experienced
true remoteness could mistake Walden for the wilderness or compare life on the
bustling pond to that on the mid-nineteenth-century prairies. Indeed, an
excellent corrective to “Walden” is the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who grew
up on those prairies, and in a genuine little house in the big woods. Wilder
lived what Thoreau merely played at, and her books are not only more joyful and
interesting than “Walden” but also, when reread, a thousand times more
harrowing. Real isolation presents real risks, both emotional and mortal, and,
had Thoreau truly lived at a remove from other people, he might have valued
them more. Instead, his case against community rested on an ersatz experience
of doing without it.
Begin with false
premises and you risk reaching false conclusions. Begin with falsified premises
and you forfeit your authority. Apologists for Thoreau often claim that he
merely distorted some trivial facts in the service of a deeper truth. But how
deep can a truth be—indeed, how true can it be—if it is not built from facts?
Thoreau contends that he went to Walden to construct a life on the basis of
ethical and existential first principles, and that what he achieved as a result
was simple and worth emulating. (His claim that he doesn’t want others to
imitate him can’t be taken seriously. For one thing, “Walden” is a guide to
doing just that, down to the number of chairs a man should own. For another,
having dismissed all other life styles as morally and spiritually desperate, he
doesn’t leave his readers much choice.)
But Thoreau did not
live as he described, and no ethical principle is emptier than one that does
not apply to its author. The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude
and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That’s just
the gap between aspiration and execution, plus the variability in our needs and
moods from one moment to the next—eminently human experiences, which, had
Thoreau engaged with them, would have made for a far more interesting and
useful book. The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but
pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did
not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities.
Why, given Thoreau’s
hypocrisy, his sanctimony, his dour asceticism, and his scorn, do we continue
to cherish “Walden”? One answer is that we read him early. “Walden” is a staple
of the high-school curriculum, and you could scarcely write a book more
appealing to teen-agers: Thoreau endorses rebellion against societal norms,
champions idleness over work, and gives his readers permission to ignore their
elders. (“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young,
their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such
miserable failures.”) “Walden” is also fundamentally adolescent in tone:
Thoreau shares the conviction, far more developmentally appropriate and
forgivable in teens, that everyone else’s certainties are wrong while one’s own
are unassailable. Moreover, he presents adulthood not as it is but as kids
wishfully imagine it: an idyll of autonomy, unfettered by any civic or familial
responsibilities.
Another reason we
cherish “Walden” is that we read it selectively. Although Thoreau is
insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing,
and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and
serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him
on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the
pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust
motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden. At one point, out in his
boat, Thoreau paddles after a loon when it submerges, to try to be nearby when
it resurfaces. “It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond,
a man against a loon,” he writes. “Suddenly your adversary’s checker disappears
beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will
appear again.” That is first-rate nature writing. Thoreau, too, emerges in a
surprising place—in a game of checkers, where a lesser writer would have
reached for hide-and-seek—and captures not only the behavior of the loon but a
very human pleasure in being outdoors.
It is also in
contemplating the land that Thoreau got the big picture right. “We can never
have enough of nature,” he wrote. “We need to witness our own limits
transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” However
sham his own retreat was, however pinched and selfish his motives in
undertaking it, he understood why the wilderness matters, and he was right that
there is something salutary, liberating, and exhilarating about living in it
with as little as necessary.
But any reading of
Thoreau that casts him as a champion of nature is guilty of cherry-picking his
most admirable work while turning a blind eye on all the rest. The other and
more damning answer to the question of why we admire him is not that we read
him incompletely and inaccurately but that we read him exactly right. Although
Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William
Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn
Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical,
élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically
opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that
Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.
Perhaps the
strangest, saddest thing about “Walden” is that it is a book about how to live
that says next to nothing about how to live with other people. Socrates, too,
examined his life—in the middle of the agora. Montaigne obsessed over himself
down to the corns on his toes, but he did so with camaraderie and mirth.
Whitman, Thoreau’s contemporary and fellow-transcendentalist, joined him in
singing a song of himself, striving to be untamed, encouraging us to resist
much and obey little. But he was generous (“Give alms to everyone that asks”),
empathetic (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and comfortable with
multitudes, his and otherwise. He would have responded to a shipwreck as he did
to the Civil War, tending the wounded and sitting with the grieving and the
dying.
Poor Thoreau. He,
too, was the victim of a kind of shipwreck—for reasons of his own psychology, a
castaway from the rest of humanity. Ultimately, it is impossible not to feel
sorry for the author of “Walden,” who dedicated himself to establishing the
bare necessities of life without ever realizing that the necessary is a low,
dull bar; whose account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning
than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and
sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one
another; who lived alongside a pond, chronicled a trip down the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, and wrote about Cape Cod, all without recognizing that it is on
watering holes and rivers and coastlines that human societies are built.
Granted, it is
sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to
live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other
people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than
governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a
parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain
and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and
the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the
individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the
pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And
yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man
whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of
us. ♦
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