Henry David Thoreau

 

Shortly before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 44, Thoreau said of Ellen Sewall, “I have always loved her. I have always loved her.”  When she had been 17 and he 22, they had spent two glorious weeks together wandering the Concord woods of summer.  However, Ellen was apparently so beautiful, intelligent, and charming, that she also attracted the attention of Thoreau’s brother John who proposed to her, and she accepted. Shortly after, she had second thoughts because she realized that the one she really loved was Henry. Her father, a Unitarian minister, had no use for any of those transcendentalists and sent her away for a vacation.  After Ellen had refused John, Henry figured that the way was now clear for him, and so he went to see her and proposed, but apparently her father’s condemnation of transcendentalists in general had had its effect, and she refused Henry too. She eventually married a Unitarian minister, had several children, but still was fond of Henry and kept a picture of him in her house. Henry apparently still had an eye for the ladies because he apparently had a crush on Emerson’s wife Lidian, and on a woman named Mrs. Brown whose husband had left her. Thoreau threw bouquets of flowers attached to poems through Mrs. Brown’s window, but he remained for the rest of his life single.

In the context of what he accomplished (or didn’t accomplish) in his life, I have often wondered what would have happened to Thoreau if he had married Ellen Sewall.  He apparently did everything Ellen asked of him except go to church. Would the married Thoreau with several children in tow have been able to avoid church? And what would Ellen have thought of the Walden project? At the very least there would have been curtains in the windows and several bedrooms, one for the visiting in-laws. However the American hero must remain single whether he goes west or stays in Concord. The married Lone Ranger would never have had time to solve everyone else’s troubles because he would be too busy helping Mrs. Lone Ranger around the house. In America, marriage and with it civilization is the end of freedom, and the end of exploration. After Ellen had turned them both down, the Thoreau brothers took a boat trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Other rejected suitors might have followed  Deer Slayer into the West.

In many ways Thoreau would have seemed like a good catch. He was a Harvard graduate with excellent grades, and he had invented a pencil that exceeded the best that Europe could offer. If he had followed the Protestant work effort of the puritans, he could have been a rich and successful man. He could have bought Ellen the best house in town and provided her with the finest clothes. But, as if mocking the Puritans with their tiresome demands for a Christian calling, Thoreau declared himself “the self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms.” Yes, he had a calling, if people expected it. And yes, he invested in “the celestial empire.”

Like his friend Emerson who was fourteen years his senior, he rejected all the conventional jobs and became a lecturer and writer.  However, unlike Emerson, he didn’t have an inherited fortune to fall back on, and he wasn’t nearly as dynamic a speaker as Emerson.  After Emerson electrified his audiences with his speeches, his audiences were eager to buy the books, but Thoreau, in contrast, was a little dull. When his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers became available at bookstores, few people bought it. Thoreau claimed to have 1200 unsold copies in his own library. By modern standards, the book was not quite up to the standards of  River Wild. There were no attacks by armed robbers, no death defying escapes, no class five rapids, just a daily journal of two brothers floating down a peaceful river making observations about plants and wildlife. When Thoreau brought out the sequel, Walden, the publishers were not very receptive. There was no excitement  to advertise the book by THE AUTHOR OF THE WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMAC RIVERS.  If you were thrilled by the adventures of those madcap Thoreau brothers in the wilds of Massachusetts, you will certainly not want to miss this exciting day by day account of a man living by himself in a cabin on Walden Pond. Financially Walden was about as successful as its predecessor.

So why are we still reading these two worst sellers  more than 150 years later? Why is there a Thoreau Society that has regular meetings  to discuss the life and works of a man who spent most of his life walking the woods of his home town and keeping a journal?  Why is there regular publication of the Thoreau Society Newsletter? One of the best books on the subject to help answer these questions is The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding. In a book of almost 500 pages, Harding explains how Thoreau spent his days much better than most people do.  As a man who stressed above all things individualism, Thoreau would have been shocked by the very idea of a Thoreau society. He would probably have said, “I lived my life. Why don’t you go and live yours?”

Thoreau was not a joiner and steadfastly refused to connect himself in any way with the leading communal societies of his day, Brook Farm and Fruitlands. Although these places hoped to create  models of social reform for the whole world, they were based on the community rather than the individual, and Emerson and Thoreau both said that reform could only come through individuals, not communities. Thoreau allegedly made a visit to Brook Farm, but maybe he was only hoping to meet the femme fatal intellectual of the time Margaret Fuller who also visited the farm only briefly. The one social movement that almost drew him into a communal effort was the abolition movement. After John Brown came to Concord, Thoreau confessed in his journal that he could no longer just sit back and enjoy the water lilies. He had to do something to help end slavery. There is some evidence that he helped at least one slave escape to Canada through the Underground Railroad.  In ways that even he could not have imagined, he also helped the integration movement almost 100 years later.

Thoreau was deeply opposed to the Mexican War which he saw as just a way to steal land from Mexico. In protest, he refused to pay taxes that might be used in the war effort. He was jailed overnight, but someone—possibly his aunt—paid them without his knowledge, and he was freed the next morning. The experienced inspired him to write one of the most important essays in world literature, Civil Disobedience.  His principal idea is quite simple: when your government demands that you do something that you believe to be wrong, disobey that government. In his belief, the Mexican War was wrong, so he disobeyed the government by not paying taxes. He was acting as an individual, but didn’t even imagine the power of many people joining together to be disobedient. The government could put one man in jail and not even be shaken, but if millions of people broke the law, there was simply not enough room in jails to put them. In his protest against English imperialism, Gandhi used Thoreau’s essay as a guide to such massive disobedience, that he defeated one of the greatest armies in the world without firing a shot. His method, like Thoreau’s,  was peaceful rather than violent. A few years later Dr. King was also inspired by Thoreau  to disobey the unjust laws of segregation. The laws (sometimes called Jim Crow laws) restricted the actions of Black Americans, and King called these laws “inconsistent with the moral law,” and therefore they had to be disobeyed. The law said that black passengers had to surrender their seats on buses to white people, and Rosa Parks refused. By encouraging massive disobedience to unjust or immoral laws, Dr. King eventually prepared the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thus making segregation illegal under federal law.  And it all began with Henry David Thoreau.

Because their ideas are so similar, Thoreau was sometimes called a disciple of Emerson, but Thoreau was more of a doer than Emerson. He was a skilled workman, and often did building projects for the Emersons.  On one occasion, Mrs. Emerson said that she could never find her gloves, and Thoreau built her a glove drawer in one of her chairs.  But Thoreau’s most practical and important job was at Walden Pond. His experiment in practical living there has sometimes been underrated because he borrowed the land from Emerson, his sisters often brought him lunch, and he had to borrow an axe. However, his cabin site is now  a shrine visited by millions of travelers every year. He may have only lived on the pond for two years, but the words that he wrote in Walden have lived on, and continue inspire many. For the Centennial of Walden,  E.B. White (of Charlotte’s Web fame) was asked to write a tribute to Thoreau, and he wrote, “A Slight Sound at Evening” (title from Walden). White feels a little guilty at first because he lives in a fine house and thinks that has fallen short of Thoreau’s ideal, but then he realizes that Thoreau is not really trying to tell everyone how to live. He just tells to be true to ourselves.

Thoreau considered his two-year stay an experiment in living. Like all experiments his had a working hypothesis: the quality of one’s life could be greatly improved by simplifying it.  The experiment was highly significant because he believed that the lives most people lived weren’t worth living. According to Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” They are desperate because they are spending too much of their lives making money to buy things that they don’t really need. Unlike Emerson who spoke in generalities, Thoreau was very specific and mathematical. He calculated how much something cost in terms of life rather than dollars. If you earned one dollar a day (a standard rate for labor in the mid-nineteenth century),  and paid $500 for a house (about average for that time), that house would cost you five hundred hours of your life.  Is a place to sleep worth 500 hours that you could have spent reading, or walking, or boating, or visiting with friends?

The chapter that sets the stage for the entire experiment in living is “Economy.”  Thoreau recognizes that before we can be self-reliant intellectually, we need to be self-reliant economically.  Then he says all our economic efforts go towards meeting four necessities:  food, clothing, shelter, and heat. The only absolute necessity is food because we could probably survive without the rest, but in our decadent modern times we need the others as well. The question is, how much of our lives do we spend getting the necessities? The less the better, Thoreau suggests. For one person, a small, snug, house with a bed, desk, and fireplace will be sufficient. Then he tells us how he built such a house himself for $28. 12 ½. (That is, he spent about 28 hours of his life in a time when most people spent about 500.) He grew his own food supplemented by fishing and hunting (one wood chuck), and after deducting for farm expenses, and adding money he earned by selling his surplus and money earned by a limited amount of pleasant day labor and the amount he spent for clothes ($8.40), his total expense for a year was $33.78 (or about one month of his life. Thus in one month, he could meet his necessities for a year, and the next year he would not have the $28 expense for the house.

One necessity that he doesn’t list, but which never seemed to be a problem was  companionship. People do not tend to do well in isolation. We really do need each other.  Contrary to popular belief, his cabin was not really out in the wilderness. It was not far from the center of town. Emerson’s house was about a mile away, and Thoreau’s family was not much further. Thoreau’s sisters often brought him sandwiches and cake, and many friends from Concord, including the Alcotts, came to see him. Also, he walked every day to the post office to pick up the gossip. The Fitchburg railroad went by the pond, and in winter laborers came to cut the ice. Interesting people often walked by the woods near his house including the Canadian woodchopper who tested the prevailing notion of the “noble savage.” Was the uneducated man close to nature wiser than an educated man? Thoreau asked the man if he thought Plato was correct to say that “man was but a bird without feathers?” He said “no. The legs bend the wrong way.” Thoreau concluded, of course, that  the truly natural  man is lacking in knowledge and  the ideal man was “half-cultivated.”

Thoreau’s  garden was also half-cultivated in the sense that Thoreau didn’t waste a great deal of time weeding it. In the “Bean-field” chapter he does some weeding but puts some literary cultivation into the job. Instead of just chopping weeds, he plays the role of Achilles in the Iliad cutting down  many a high-crested Trojan warrior.  In this concept of the half-cultivated person, Thoreau has caught the essence of the American character. To be too cultivated is to be pretentious and pompous, but too be too little cultivated is to be a barbarian. The ideal is in the middle. Let the American be educated but at the same time be a man of the people. Knowing which fork to use is not as important as being hospitable.

In addition to the need for companionship, Thoreau also needed books, pens, and writing paper. The books he mostly borrowed, many from the Harvard library.

If you free yourself from the drudgery of working hard to buy things you don’t need, what do you do with your time? Many people fill their days with work, but Thoreau suggested an alternative: read, write, and walk. He spent many of his days walking around Concord and was proud to say, “I have traveled widely in Concord.” Concord was a microcosm of the universe, and if he knew it well, he would know the world. If Emerson was a “Transparent eyeball,” so was Thoreau who apparently saw all that could be seen.  People liked to walk with him, including the young Louisa May Alcott—the author of Little Women—who lived nearby. Thoreau appears under another name as a character in her book. One guest asked him if there were any Indian arrowheads around, and Thoreau found dozens where other people saw nothing.

Thoreau lived at Walden a little over two years—starting on the 4^th of July-- and kept a journal of all that he had seen and done.  Walden is a compilation of his journal entries, but he condenses them into one year. In Walden, he takes his readers on a one-year journey into the woods. His purpose may have been to give the book an allegorical structure which some critics have called “the metaphor of the seasons.” He begins in the summer (the season of maturity and reflection). Takes us into fall (old age), then winter ( death) and ends triumphantly  with Spring the season of rebirth. In spring he echoes the Bible with the words, “Walden was dead but is alive again.”  And, “on a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.” Ellen Sewall might have been pleased with what seems to be a confirmation of Christian values, but Thoreau’s religion, like Emerson’s, was outdoors, not in a church. Thoreau’s religious inspiration at the melting of the pond is comparable to Emerson’s response to the snow storm in “The Divinity School Address.” Walden ends triumphantly: life is definitely worth loving if we simplify our lives and move in the direction of our dreams.

Thoreau never tries to coerce us into living the way he lived, but is just telling us that what worked for him might work for you. If you feel that your life is a life “of quiet desperation,” try to simplify it. Only once in Walden does he try to intervene in another person’s life, and he fails.  In the Baker Farm Chapter, he tells of a laborer named John Field who works all day bogging meadows for a dollar a day. He has to work hard to rent a large, drafty and leaky house, and to put meat and butter on his table.  Thoreau tells him how to build his own house for much less than he is paying rent and urges him to take the afternoon off to go fishing. Field responds the way most of us would. He goes back to work. We are all so conditioned to work in our calling, that we don’t realize that we have any alternative.

 

Walden is certainly one of the great books in world literature, and it is certainly Thoreau’s masterpiece. He wrote a Journal of the Maine Woods, and several great essays including “Walking,” “Life Without Principle,” and “The Last Days of John Brown” (a work that made John Brown a martyr), but he will be remembered most for Walden.

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