Not long ago I took part in a week-long seminar on Thoreau’s Walden, put on by my alma mater, St John’s College, and headed by two excellent tutors. We met every day for a week. As is the St. John’s way, we read no other texts, consulted no biographies or interpretations—just Walden.
(One of my personal surprises was that I had never read Walden before. It took me about 40 pages of reading to become convinced that this was really new. I guess I thought I knew Thoreau. I could quote parts of Walden, I once visited Walden Pond; it was so ‘familiar’ that I assumed at some point, when I was young, I had read it. Not so.)
‘Going to Walden’ is almost a meme for many Americans (and others—Yeats loved Walden). It means turning your back on society, going into the wilderness (with one or two favorite books), communing with nature. Walden had only modest success when published, but over the years has become discovered and re-discovered to become an American classic. Young people especially often go through a Waldenesque phase. The popularity of camping and backpacking is due in part to Thoreau (an attraction lost on many, like my mother, who grew up on a farm and thought deliberately going out into the woods for days on end was nuts).
Going all the way to Walden means not just leaving society but turning a baleful gaze on it. Thoreau’s view of his fellow humans is a mix of bemusement and annoyance—at one point he talks about Concordians as objects of his study, like prairie dogs. He is not exactly a misanthrope, he enjoys engaging with people, but at an emotional distance. Walden is replete with criticism of the way most people live, in particular their preoccupation with making a living and adding to their possessions.
So what was Thoreau doing, and why? As our group quickly learned, Thoreau didn’t go very far. Walden Pond is only a few miles from Concord, within sight of a railroad line, and frequented regularly by swimmers and fishermen and ice-cutters and other visitors. The land around the lake had been farmed and timbered for generations. It was hardly a howling wilderness.
Our seminar discussed frequently the question of whether Thoreau had some larger social or political object in mind in going to Walden, or in writing Walden. He is strongly opposed to slavery and to the war with Mexico, which is ongoing during his sojourn. He relates very briefly his overnight stay in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest at these government sins. But I was hard-pressed to find a motive for his stay other than a personal desire to live like a ‘hermit,’ (the description he uses several times for himself during his Walden period) and to see life from a different perspective.
What I think happens is that Thoreau finds, to his surprise, and ultimately the surprise of others, that there is a great deal of interest in his ‘hermiting.’ He tells us at the beginning of his book that he is writing it largely in response to numerous questions he was asked, and still gets asked, about his experience: “Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid, and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.” It seems clear that Thoreau becomes famous as ‘that Walden hermit,’ and that this is an identity he carries with him for the rest of his life, an identity that solidified when he published a whole book about his ‘experiment.’
And it turns out lots of people find his experiment intriguing and attractive. More people than might have been expected shared some of Thoreau’s unhappiness with society, with the hectic pace of modern living (Thoreau goes on at some length about the pernicious influence of railroads), with the burdens of ownership and farming and debt and emerging industrialization. As the world has gone further and faster down these paths, Thoreau’s attraction has grown.
A recurring seminar question was, is Thoreau a true American or a kind of anti-American, an American gadfly like Socrates? Thoreau never claims to be modeling his life on anyone else, but his message to his contemporaries is almost completely captured by Socrates’s charge in the Apology: “are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?” Like Socrates (or Confucius) Thoreau sees philosophy as a way of life, not a collection of doctrines.
Much of what seems most characteristically American to, say, contemporary observers like Tocqueville—our restlessness, our intense focus on success and acquisition, our proclivity to join together in associations, our casual violence (towards Native Americans and African slaves, but not only them) and drunkenness, our faith in progress and constant betterment—is anathema to Thoreau. He abjures even tea and coffee, and has no interest in philanthropy or teaching or any sort of project to improve his fellow citizens.
An important way that Thoreau sees himself as un-American is that his idea of a good life is inseparable from books and reading. His Walden experiment is motivated in large part by a simple desire to read more: “My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading than a university…” He strongly prefers old books, the classics, especially Homer and various Latin authors. He is equally partial to old eastern texts, quoting the Vedas and Confucius as much or more than Western writers.
Thoreau in Walden never engages with any modern thinkers. He must be aware that in Europe Hegel and his followers are dominant, that Marx and his fellow socialists are feverishly attacking capitalism, that doctrines of progress and historical necessity are all the rage. Thoreau is however no believer in progress. Where Marx attacks capitalism with the aim of going beyond it and distributing the fruits of modern science and industry to all, Thoreau wants to convince us we are better off giving up these fruits altogether. His studied avoidance of his contemporaries helps give Walden its aura of timelessness, of being an ‘instant classic,’ that is part of its charm.
What is American (or at least what fits the American self-image) is Thoreau’s insistence on questioning other people’s opinions and accepting only his own direct experience; as he famously says marching to his ‘own drummer.’ He is not a scientist, but if there is anything Walden demonstrates and tries to teach, it is the value of close and careful observation, without preconceptions. Science ratifies what men learn on their own; he praises hunters and fishermen by saying “We are most interested when science reports what those men know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.”
Thoreau stays at Walden a bit over two years, then leaves for reasons he doesn’t explain. My own view is that Thoreau concludes that hermiting is not the best way to live an entire life, though it may be an important part or phase of a good life; something worth experiencing for a time, and possibly re-experiencing periodically. This could be related to his avoidance, in Walden, of any reflection on love or or what we might call the erotic side of his own nature. Desire, procreation, family—these are mostly absent, and when mentioned it is not positively. In his ascetic moments he preaches a sharp dualism between our ‘animal’ and higher natures, and recommends abstinence: “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like are but various fruits which succeed it.” Throttling our erotic impulses is an inseparable part of the Walden experience, necessary for Thoreau’s proud self-sufficiency. Giving in to love needs to happen somewhere else, if at all.
This dualism raises the question of the purpose of Thoreau’s experiment. He tells us that he goes into the woods to ‘live deliberately,’ and ‘to front only the essential facts of life.’ It is in his relation to Nature that this experiment will succeed or fail: “Let us live one day as deliberately as Nature…” But what is the relation he seeks? A sharp distinction between spirit and animal would seem to lead to a distant relationship, a dispassionate observer who stands apart from the natural world: “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers..”
When people today call Thoreau our first environmentalist, what I think they mean is that Thoreau sees all living things and the world they live in as interconnected and interdependent, including man. Man has no unique or special status, as his contemporary Darwin will soon be revealing. Connecting to Nature means losing any sense of separation and superiority. Thoreau does not always speak like this.
But sometimes he does. Towards the start of the chapter titled “Higher Laws” he says: “Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good [emphasis mine].”
For a more modern take on the attractions of the wild I recently read Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by a British author, George Monbiot. Monbiot is obsessed with trying to re-introduce animals and plants back into the European landscape from which they were driven, often thousands of years ago. He wants to see forests where today there is sheep-blasted barren heath; beavers and lynx and eagles anchoring a rich tapestry to replace agricultural monocultures; even someday aurochs, bison, rhinoceros and elephants.
Monbiot carefully informs us of the environmental and practical benefits that could accrue from these efforts. But his underlying interest is more spiritual and closer to Thoreau. He thinks human beings have lost touch with the wild and therefore with their greatest happiness. After spending time in Africa with members of the Maasai, hunting lions and raiding their neighbors for cattle, he has an epiphany:
As I watched the warriors sitting hand in hand on the pallet, and the young woman looking tenderly at her husband, I was struck by a thought so clear and resonant that it was as if a bell had been rung beside my ear. Had I, as an embryo, been given a choice between my life and his–knowing that, whichever I accepted, I would adapt to it and make myself comfortable within it–I would have taken his.
Monbiot walks away, in part because he knows he is too soft, but also because the Maasai way of life is ending as government restrictions curtail traditional patterns.
Rewilding is Monbiot’s partial solution; not a return to tribal life, but an attempt to give modern humans regular access to a natural world that is more wondrous, more strange, more unpredictable and uncontrolled, than we have now. He wants us to set aside large areas in which we take our hands off the wheel and let nature take its course. Maybe in such a world some people would go wild and turn their backs on civilization; most would not, but he thinks people would benefit immensely from an occasional immersion, even from just knowing that this world existed and thrived.
Monbiot cites Benjamin Franklin’s famous observation about Native Americans and civilization, likely familiar to Thoreau:
When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
(The same experience continued on the frontier as long as Indian tribes existed beyond the reach of Europeans, as chronicled in an excellent book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel.)
Why doesn’t Thoreau, like Monbiot, at least consider joining the Indians? He knows them well and regularly praises much in their way of life. The New England tribes have perhaps been too thoroughly tamed, but further West they are still wild and free. However, Thoreau wants the wild and the good, and the good includes the life of the mind, poetry, reading the classics, and other pursuits not possible If you completely turn your back on civilization. It means sometimes standing apart from the wild.
And maybe, like Monbiot, Thoreau knows the freedom of Native Americans is about to come to an end. He goes to Walden when he can see the handwriting on the wall. Soon all of America will be full of railroads, every forest will be felled, every body of water tamed and measured. Every tribe will be ‘civilized.’ Thoreau sees the opposite of the good, the drive for gain and growth, leading to the destruction of the wild. Life doesn’t have to be this way, as he often points out; but just as often he relates how his teachings about frugality fall on deaf ears. His time at Walden is rejuvenating but also melancholy. The wild is in retreat, a retreat that is turning into a rout.
The Monbiot solution, rewilding, has gained some traction as human beings take stock of the terrible consequences—material and spiritual—of our wholesale assault on the natural world. But it requires investments over a long period of time, in the face of tremendous resistance from vested interests and a population that is afraid, with some reason, of losing control over nature. Monbiot, more than Thoreau, is clear about the dangers and tradeoffs. Nature is not just playful loons and beautiful spring flowers. It includes floods and droughts, trampling elephants and pandemics.
The same questions can be asked about human nature. Thoreau has a rather benign view of his fellow man, boasting that he never needs to lock his Walden cottage. He has a malign view of government, developed in his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” where he states at the start “That government is best which governs not at all,” and goes on to say: “Yet 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.” What governments do is countenance slavery and start unjust wars. Thoreau is in short violently opposed to the Hobbesian tradeoff, obedience for security. He exhorts Americans to disobey unjust acts of their sovereign. He is not impressed by America’s constitution or democracy. All governments are immoral and meddling, differing only in degree.
Monbiot is more willing to acknowledge that human beings can be dangerous and unpredictable. The Maasai enjoy raiding and harassing their neighbors, have no respect for private property, and are partial to bouts of feasting, drinking, and carrying on that would make Thoreau’s hair stand on end. We have laws and police forces and government institutions for some good reasons. If rewilding includes human beings, there will be costs.
Thoreau’s solution, temporarily retreating to our own versions of Walden, is more realistic if less far-reaching. Each of us has the ability, at least for awhile, to simplify our lives and free time and energy for the things that matter. Communing with the natural world, however, is harder now. It can’t be done a few miles from Concord. Fewer and fewer Americans retain even a slender connection to living practically ‘in nature,’ via the childhood hunting and fishing that Thoreau praises; Thoreau’s contemporaries, the ones who ignore his advice, are far more at home in the wild than most Americans today. Without rewilding, access to nature will become harder and rarer.
And going to Walden is not just a matter of finding the right place, but finding the strength to think on our own once we get there. If Thoreau came back today, he would probably say that we have wiped clean not only the natural landscape but our intellectual and spiritual landscape as well. We have replaced the solid foundation of the Iliad and the Vedas, “the noblest recorded thoughts of man,” with a hodge-podge of disconnected learning. The din of news and the expectation of constant social connection have greatly expanded. Slowing down, disconnecting, and unlearning, central to Thoreau’s experiment, are harder now than ever.
Walden still resonates, in some ways even more than when it was written. But it is in danger of becoming not a call to follow Thoreau along a difficult but recognizable path, but a description of something, like joining the Indians, that has vanished beyond recovery.