Reconsiderations

• Single page /
• Email

Understanding the whole of Walden is a hopeless task. Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture; ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings: psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural. To my mind though, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is most crucial to read Walden as a practical environmentalist’s volume and to search for Thoreau’s heirs among those trying to change our relation to the planet. We need to understand that when Thoreau sat in the dooryard of his cabin “from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house,” he was offering counsel and example exactly suited for our critical moment in time.

Born in 1817, Thoreau studied at Harvard and then eventually returned to his native Concord in 1837. It was here that he fell in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott—and through them with the whole Transcendental world, including Margaret Fuller, editor of The Dial, the start-up Transcendentalist periodical that first put the young Thoreau in print. He worked odd jobs as a surveyor, a tutor, and in his family’s pencil business until the spring of 1845, when he built the small cabin a mile and a half from his boyhood home on the shore of Walden Pond. Save for frequent trips back to town for dinner, a night in the Concord jail for nonpayment of taxes—the inspiration for his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience”—and a trip to the Maine woods to climb Mount Katahdin, he stayed in the cabin for two years, two months, and two days. But when he came to write his great book, he collapsed this stretch of time into a single year, resulting in one of the great American books, a volume that launched what would become the environmental idea. In it he tackled questions that had previously seemed obvious: How much do we need? How should we live? What were we built for? He was not an organizer, not an environmentalist—it is unlikely he would have joined the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society—but he sensed a century early the questions that would one day define the counterculture and the environmental era.

Thoreau lived at the very onset of the Industrial Age, and so knew nothing about the destruction wreaked by carcinogenesis, or aerosol cans full of chlorofluorocarbons. One reads him in vain for descriptions of smog or mass extinction. In fact, he is gratified and reassured by the profligacy of the living world: “I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can afford to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another, that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road.” His world was not used up, suffering—he reveled in the unspoiled wonders of Mount Katahdin on a climbing expedition that took him through the heart of that then mighty wilderness. And though he could perhaps foresee the ruination that greed might cause, he had no inkling that we could damage the ozone let alone warm the globe. “Thank God men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth,” he wrote. “We are safe on that side for the present.”

1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. Next »

• Single page /
• Email