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Walden, Amended

Introduction (continued)

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Like Thoreau, Walden is many things: a record of life at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a curmudgeonly indictment of society, a meditation about self-reliance, an exhortation to turn off the noise. To set it down is to miss all of these, as well as the flashes of Yankee humor, which is cranky and sardonic and easily overlooked.

 

The United States in the mid-1800’s was still a young country feeling its way toward a national identity. During this time Walt Whitman, self-publishing Leaves of Grass, and Emily Dickinson, writing in isolation, brought us a new poetry; Herman Melville, with Moby Dick, a new literature. By confronting slavery Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass forged a new conscience. Amid all this literary and social ferment, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau and others, practicing the short-lived philosophy of Transcendentalism, turned from materialism to see divinity in all nature and humanity; they believed spiritual insight came directly from within, for they believed divinity came from within. Walden, very much a part of this shaping of America, echoes with Transcendentalism on every page, albeit with a strong, empirical bent. The cabin in the woods was a laboratory; the experiment: stripping the frills and toil from life to unveil core truths.

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Because Walden is much admired but seldom read, a mythic hermit-sage has supplanted the real human being. In speaking from the past to us in the present, Thoreau would sound less oracular and more conversational if we could hear the ornery, sociable, independent, gregarious, self-centered and modest man he was, one full of contradictions and not above shaping his story to achieve literary ends. Despite the popular image of isolation and self-sufficiency, Walden in fact states the cabin was a scant mile and a half from Concord village—about a half-hour walk. Thoreau openly wrote about receiving frequent visitors and returning to Concord for the company of friends and family. Critics also tell us, with considerable glee, that his mother baked cookies for him and he carried laundry home for her to wash. He was sanctimonious, aloof; a privileged, Harvard educated white man who could opt to live alone in the woods because he had a network of social support. He was an ardent abolitionist who circulated petitions for neighbors in need, danced, made music, hosted parties and was popular with children. Indeed, Thoreau was both, depending on circumstances. He was as complex and conflicted as any of us, maybe even more so given the developing industrial society and the rumblings of civil war.

    

As a document of how Thoreau pared the nonessentials from his life, so he could work as he wished, we might understand Walden less as a guide for living and more as a memoir. Like any memoir, we read it for entry to his world and take only what is relevant to ours. From the onset he confessed its lessons may not be suitable for everyone:

 

"As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits."

 

Consequently, we should read Walden seriously but not always literally. When Thoreau dismissed the need for trains traveling at the frightful speed of thirty miles an hour, we understand we cannot give up our trains, planes and automobiles but nevertheless must slow down to perceive the real world and mine its wisdom. A meticulous observer of nature, he carried a spyglass to study the birds around him, and doubtless would be awed by modern instruments revealing entire realms, from atoms to galaxies, which he never imagined. While contemplating his own world, Thoreau grounds us with pictures such as this, of Walden Pond one morning:

 

". . . as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed . . ."