Walden Pond, Concord, MA in winter
I hope you'll forgive this long winded-article but I was moved to write it after rediscovering a lost interest. Frankly I never read Walden Pond although knew about it and it is on my book list, why I’m writing this is because in the July edition of the TLS, I read a republished review by Virginia WooIfe. Yes that Virginia Woolfe, who in the July issue of 1917, wrote about Thoreau one hundred years after the publication of his book. I used to be an avid reader of the TLS (Times Literary Supplement), a wonderful newspaper and the offshoot of The Times, which has reviews, critiques and essays and usually some of the authors of the day, reviewing both modern and old books.
So this is about Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a series of 18 essays, which became a book entitled, Walden Pond; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, and based on his experience staying there in a self-built log cabin and following his dream of creating something that would aspire to his Transcendentialism.
Henry David Thoreau
This last decade has been strange for me in that I didn’t read as much and slowly stopped my subscription to the TLS. In July I bought the aforementioned and got hooked again. I have to quote Mrs Woolfe for her opening line: “A hundred years ago, on July 12, 1817, was born Henry David Thoreau, the son of a pencil-maker in Concord, Massachusetts” she goes on ‘His life was not eventful; he had, as he says, “real genius for staying at home.”’
200 years on and he is not unknown. Despite his self-admitted stay-at-homeness, in fact he became quite industrious, hence the building of a log cabin, near Walden Pond, built mostly by hand. His father had managed to send him to Harvard, although it was clear he had no real interest in the college, despite the expense to his family of him being there. His features were described as being “large-featured, but brooding, immobile, fixed in a mystic egoism. Yet his eyes were sometimes searching, as if he had dropped, or expected to find, something.”
He would have been described today as a bit of an oddball, his physical pleasures were walking and camping out, he liked being alone, he smoked odd tobacco and venerated Indian relics as much as Greek classics, and he kept copious notes and diaries. His first job was as a schoolmaster, “brought to an end due to the necessity of flogging his pupils. He proposed to talk morals to them instead”. He didn’t like doing this and resigned.
He was lucky enough to come to the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his mentor. Emerson the American essayist, lecturer and poet, who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the pressures of society.
The transcendentalist movement represented the effort of, according to Mrs Woolfe, “one or two remarkable people to shake off the old clothes, which had become uncomfortable to them and fit themselves more closely to what now appeared them to be the realities.” There were new ways of life which seemed to the leaders of the movement to give scope for the attainment of those new hopes.
Walden details Thoreau’s experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days, in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time to write his first book, ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers’. The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and used passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.
Walden Pond book jacket
By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period.
That was not all Thoreau became, he was also a poet and philosopher, an abolitionist, a naturalist, a tax resister, the refusal to pay tax because of opposition to the government that is imposing the tax, or to government policy, or as opposition to taxation in itself. A form of direct action and, if in violation of the tax regulations, also a form of civil disobedience.
Later the Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi and also the Women’s Suffrage movement used this method of protest in their campaigns. Thoreau was very obviously a man of conscience and his intense interest in nature and much self-interest drove him to achieve something that is both remarkable and historic. The hut he built with his own hands, reluctantly having to borrow an axe to help with some part of the work, and he settled down to, according to Mrs Woolfe “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”
He became ill in his forties and had to endure months inside, but he had found comfort in nature and said that in nature, ‘there is no sadness’ and he had learnt contentment. He left behind a true legacy; his philosophy and the beginnings of environmentalism, still being fought for today.
Walden Pond
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Laws that were laws passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850, to provide for the return of slaves who escaped from one state into another state or territory. His theories of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts of among others, Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist though according to Wikipedia; “civil disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government”. Well it was an idea worth copying. It's such a pity that we never seem to learn from history.
These are the Montgomery woods, USA, but they could easily be the woods in the nature reserve in Concord.
On a personal note, I haven’t visited Walden Pond per se, but some years ago had been to the 61-acre nature reserve just outside of Concord, MA. It was very beautiful. Reading this article, I felt privileged to have rediscovered Virginia Woolf whom I admire very much. I’ve read much about her life and the era she lived in, and learnt a lot through learning about Thoreau, so much so that it has prompted me to re-subscribe to the TLS. As a book lover, this is the perfect gift for someone recently retired, but unwilling to admit it.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ the full article in their archives.
The book is still in print and available on Amazon.