When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, 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.
Walden: Life in the Woods is one of those classic books that permeates Western culture to the extent that we all pretty much think we know what it’s about — Henry David Thoreau built himself a little cabin in the woods and lived there, self-sufficiently, for a good while, shunning all society — and it is pretty much that; but a lot more, too. As a disciple of Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau actually built his cabin on a piece of Emerson’s property, and it was under his mentor’s instructions, and with his occasional material support, that Thoreau decided to retreat to Walden Pond and take the time and the guidance of nature to solidify and record his personal philosophies. Walden includes some details of Thoreau’s life in the woods (which I found to be mostly interesting) but it’s more about Thoreau’s philosophy (which I found to be too often turgid and dull). Thoreau scholar Ken Kifer explains:
Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons: First, it was written in an older prose, which uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence. Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, paradoxes, and double entendres. He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers. And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out to understand.
I caught many Biblical and Shakespearian allusions in Walden, and Thoreau indicates when he’s quoting from Cato or Confucius or the Bhagavad Gita, but short of reading Ken Kifer’s annotated analysis of this book (which would make for more understanding but take up far too much more of my reading time), I will just need to accept that much of this went over my head. I can acknowledge that this is a classic and Thoreau has served as an inspiration for many, but as a record of my own reading experience, I have to award a middling three stars. (I also acknowledge that this review is way too long, with far too many quotes, but what follows is for my own rememberance and doesn't add much to the "review" of Walden.)
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 did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I 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, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
The first chapter/essay, Economy (which compromises about a third of the whole book), lays out a lot of the anti-societal/anti-Capitalist ideas that Thoreau brought with him to his project. First published in 1854 (in what he refers to as “this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century”), Thoreau was already decrying the rat race that his fellow men were doomed to engage in. Not only did he pity the farmers:
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
But, moreso, Thoreau’s general opinion of the pursuit of the American Dream was bleak:
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, 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.
This “worse to have a northern master” really hasn't weathered well, and it certainly rubbed me the wrong way, until I realised that it was just a rhetorical flourish; not only was Thoreau an abolitionist who aided the Underground Railroad, but he famously refused to pay his poll tax for several years (because he refused to finance the American war with Mexico, which he saw as an attempt to spread slavery further south) and recounts how he was arrested for this:
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.
(This is about the extent of Thoreau’s political bombast in Walden and I am interested in following up with his essay, Civil Disobedience.) Although he does confess to eating the odd bits of pork and fish at his cabin, Thoreau makes the case for an animal-free diet:
Having been my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.
And the following are some favourite quotes:
• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. 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. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.
• Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass,—this was my daily work.
• I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
• A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
• It (a hawk) appeared to have no companion in the universe,—sporting there alone,—and to need none but the morning and the ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the crevice of a crag;—or was its native nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow’s trimmings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud.
And, finally, to how Thoreau’s sums up his two years, two months, and two days at Walden Pond:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. 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.
Mallory — who gave me this book — saw me reading it and asked what it was roughly about because her current favourite singer, Phoebe Bridgers, recently released a song with the line, "We spent a week in the cold / just long enough to 'Walden' it with you". I was able to explain to Mal that Thoreau famously built himself a little cabin in the woods to get away from society, and she thought that that made perfect sense of the line. When I was able to add the fact (newly learned to me) that Thoreau was more antiestablishment than merely hermitic, Mal (who is becoming more rabidly antiestablishment all the time) was further impressed. And I want to note that while all the nice quotes make this look like a more than three star read, it really was dull for the most part. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (reviewed here) is a similar work, but was much more engaging and interesting to me.
