Month: June 2002

As an INTP, I’m quite familiar with "Solitude," and, like Thoreau, I often seek out solitude to deal with my inner feelings. Some people like to talk out their feelings. Me, I like to walk alone and figure out what I’m really feeling or try to deal with the emotions before I have to deal with people. In fact, I doubt that I would have ever been able to resolve some problems without time alone to contemplate them.

While Thoreau strives to show a connection between solitude and nature, he probably had this desire for solitude long before he moved to Walden Pond:

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.

Considering that every single English teacher at the school I taught at was an Introvert, one suspects that the desire to read may play a large role in determining whether or not people seek solitude, certainly a larger role than an appreciation of nature.

And if one is more concerned with ideas than with social interaction, it’s not unlikely that everyday social interactions can be seen as a burden rather than as a blessing:

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Only a true introvert, though, would find “etiquette and politeness” a burden.

As if to show that he is not a misanthrope, Thoreau does describe a few people he was happy to have regular contact with while staying at Walden Pond.

An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet.

One suspects, though, it is her “genius of unequalled fertility” that makes her so welcome in Thoreau’s world.

Perhaps it was passages like the following that so made me feel a kinship with Thoreau when I first read him so many years ago:

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar….

For some of us, there is a need, at least at times, to feel free of others, to stand alone and take in nature itself. It’s the kind of westering feeling that made men in the 1850’s pick up their lives and head west, seeking out their true place in the universe.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond as much for the solitude as he did for the sense of nature:

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish for pouts — they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness — but they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never profaned by any human neighborhood.

Keeping in mind that Thoreau was never quite as isolated as he seems to suggest, he was after all, a short walk from Concord, many people would still feel cut off and isolated in this kind of environment:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant.

For Thoreau, nature seemed to provide a sense of companionship that most people associate with being around other people:

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

To me, this sense of oneness with nature seems perfectly normal, and I’m surprised when people say they don’t like to hike alone, that they like to hike in a group. Perhaps that is because, like Thoreau, I often feel a kind of presence in nature:

I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

You don’t need to be alone to get this kind of feeling. In fact, I sometimes get exactly the same feeling in Portland’s Japanese Gardens surrounded by people who feel exactly the same way I do. However, I do think you’re more likely to be aware of this feeling when you’re alone.

Standing alone in nature is also when one is most apt to make another discovery:

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

This is precisely the presence that Whitman seems to celebrate in Song of Myself, the sense of “otherness” often describes in meditation books. It is the “out of body experience” some claim to have experienced in near-death experiences. For Thoreau, though, it seems to be the experience of the Oversoul.

Diane’s Photo of Walden Pond

Walden, Chapter five Solitude

Because Thoreau recognized he was living a unique life on Walden Pond, away from the village and by himself, he quiets people’s concerns about loneliness. By the time I finished reading this chapter,I was ready to leave the village myself and find my own Walden Pond.

Thoreau expresses his delight in being part of the natural universe “when the body is one sense…I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature…”

Returning from one of his evening walks, he finds he has had visitors who leave touching calling cards made of leaves and twigs–a bouquet of flowers, a wreath of evergreen on his cabin table. He is pleased someone has come to see him, but he does not feel disappointment that he has missed his callers.

He continues to explain the source of his serenity.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still…it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they [other people] beyond any deserts that I am conscious of.

Only for only hour did Thoreau feel lonely and that he chalks up to an insanity.

I have never felt lonesome or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but one, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhoods of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.

For Thoreau it was more important to be near the perennial source of life, rather than to any man or his institutions–the depot, the post-office, or the barroom.

For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to made our occasions.

To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Thoreau argued that we are never alone, really, if we will but recognize how we are a part of nature.

So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

Two people visit Thoreau regularly. Their appearances are somewhat mystical, and I’m not convinced they really exist. One visitor is an old settler, the original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden Pond. “…he is thought to be dead, [but] none can show where he is buried.”

The second visitor is “an elderly dame…invisible to most persons,” who keeps an herb garden Thoreau enjoys. She tells him the origins of myths.

One more statement to convince us Thoreau never felt lonely away from his compatriots.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?

Nature is the healing force.

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always,,,For my panacea, instead on one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the dead Sea,…let me have a draught of undiluted morning air.

I am convinced Thoreau truly believed he was an integral part of the natural world that surrounded him at Walden Pond, and this belief warded off any loneliness he might have felt living away from the village.

Diane McCormick

Although I agreed with much of what Thoreau had to say in this section, surprisingly, I also found much that I disagreed with. As an ex-English teacher and a writer of a literary weblog, I obviously agreed with much of what Thoreau had to say about the importance of books. What I tended to disagree with was his attitude towards what we should be reading.

I tended to agree with Thoreau that truth is immortal and that we have much to learn from philosophers and religious writers from different periods of time:

…in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

We certainly have much to learn from earlier writers, much that even Thoreau was unable to read. For instance, the Tao de Ching seems as relevant today as it was the day it was written. Classic works have become classic because they still reveal truths about the human condition.

I also agree that to read “true” books well is a noble exercise:

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Having tried to teach literature for years I can certainly attest to the fact that reading “serious” literature is not easy. It is a skill that is acquired by practice. The more serious literature you read, the easier it is to read, though they must always be read with consciousness.

The corollary of this is that serious books are one of the greatest of mankind’s treasures:

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

While I may question whether anyone belongs to an “aristocracy,” I would agree that books belong on the shelves of every home. And whether people are aware of it or not, their lives are influenced by past literature.

Where I disagree with Thoreau, though, is that the classics must be read in their own language. If this were true, it would be impossible for any one person to have read Japanese, Chinese, and Indian religious classics, much less Greek and Roman classics.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript.

Thoreau continues his elitist argument suggesting that works of great poets can only truly be read by other great poets:

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

Since it’s unlikely that most of us are ever going to become “great poets” this would seem to make such works irrelevant, whereas the very opposite seems to be true. They allow us insights we might never be able to articulate on our own.

While I have personally chosen to limit most of my reading to serious works and avoided reading for entertainment, I disagree that there is anything wrong with this kind of reading, unless it displaces more serious reading:

For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.

I doubt there is any more danger from reading such works than there is from eating deserts, unless, of course, one chooses to eat nothing but desert and eliminates healthier fare.

The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market.

Too much TV or too many romantic novels may well have a dulling effect, but the same may be said of virtually any overindulgence.

Still, it’s hard to deny Thoreau when he says:

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

I doubt that many people have made learning a life-long goal. Most people seem to believe in the “inoculation” theory of education, the one that says once you’ve had a course there’s no need to ever go back. For many people, the day they graduate from high school or from college is the last day of their “education,” though all will continue to learn from life’s experiences.

Thoreau seems to me to be right when he argues that there are valuable books awaiting to be discovered that can make dramatic changes in our life:

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Indeed, it is this hope, this belief that keeps me writing this blog, and in general this belief has been fulfilled as I have explored new works.

Another benefit that we certainly need in these times of international turmoil is the “liberalty” that Thoreau claims comes from reading widely:

Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board.

Though I’m not sure you can count on a wide background of reading creating a liberal person, I suspect it does have that effect on most readers.

To me, though, Thoreau saved his best idea for last:

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

Life-long learning is essential to mankind, particularly in a world where there is so much to learn. In fact, one of my dreams for the internet is that it can become the school of the future where people who love to learn can do so from their home without cost. At its best, the internet could provide a support group for these learners.

Despite the obvious effort of some students to merely look for an easy way to complete their homework, the original goal of this site was to provide a place where adults, not necessarily students, could learn about writers they hadn’t met before. In addition, most of the sites I link to provide the same opportunity to gain a self-education. I go to these sites to read new ideas and to gain insights I haven’t had before.

First put down Nora Roberts…

I enjoy a good crime novel as much as anyone (In addition to Walden, I’m also reading John Sandford’s new book Mortal Prey). I know Thoreau would not approve. I promise, Henry, I won’t enjoy it, OK?

For if ever a teacher wished to find an advocate for the classics, she needs to look no further than chapter three of Walden.

This chapter entitled “Reading,” a most passionate plea for education, begins this advocacy with

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers…In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal,
and need fear no change nor accident.

The reading of the classics, “I kept Homer’s Iliad on my table through the summer,” is essential to learn the truth. To benefit from the reading of Greek and Latin classic, he also recommended learning enough of the languages so that the books could be read in the original.

…the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?

It follows that Thoreau would think the writer the most eloquent artist.

…the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

The consummate bibliophile therefore wrote

A written word is the choicest of relics…It is the work of art nearest to life itself…Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations…Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

The noble purpose for reading was not to be found in merely transacting business, but in reading books for which

…we have to stand on tiptoe to read, not for the rest of [our lives] vegetate and dissipate [our] faculties in what is called easy reading.

Perhaps for fear of being misunderstood, Thoreau suggests a consequence for novelists.

I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weathercocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty,and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks.

Wow! Thoreau would really be unhappy even with the New York Times best seller list.

What becomes of the readers of such dross?

The result [of easy reading] is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties.

Surely Thoreau was not speaking of the readers of his contemporaries–Twain, Dickens, Poe, Eliot, Stowe, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hugo, and Irving.

Finding another reader of the classics in their original languages would be a problem, Thoreau admitted. Even college professors had hardly “mastered the difficulties.”

The point is carried further in that Thoreau seemed honestly concerned that without reading widely his compatriots didn’t know of the literature and bibles of other cultures. The thought crosses my mind that perhaps Americans would have a better understanding of the true teachings of Islam if we read the Koran. Technology, which Thoreau probably would have mixed feelings about, does provide us with so much more education than the average person acquired in the 19th century. Type in Koran on the Internet and learn about that religion for yourself. Devote less time to “Little Reading,…[which is] worthy only of pygmies and manikins.”

If readers are not yet hanging their heads in guilt over the novels stacked by the bedside, read this:

We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate.

What will be the outcome of our reading good works?

…with wisdom we shall learn liberality.

I do like Thoreau’s way of advocating life long learning, a catch phrase of nearly every high school in America. Thoreau called them common schools.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure–if they are indeed so well off–to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?

…the village should in some respects…be the patron of the fine arts.

Finally a purpose is found for the reading of the newspaper.

If we will read newspaper, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once?…Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us, and we will see if they know anything….As the nobleman of cultivated
taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces to his culture,–genius–learning–wit–books–paintings–statuary–music–philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the village do,–not stop short at a pedagogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these.

New England can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

How can one argue with that?

Diane McCormick

Despite the title of this chapter,"Where I Lived, and What I Lived for", where he lived seems less important to Thoreau than what he lived for if we are to believe this essay. As long as you live fully, wherever you live is an ideal place. The key is to simplify your life to the point that you can live freely and find the inner truth that is reflected in eternity itself.

It has always struck me that Thoreau essentially chose a “monastic” life when he retired to Walden Pond. For a Transcendentalist, what better place for a cloister than Walden Pond? Living at Walden Pond while immersed in nature freed Thoreau from the daily cares that distract all of us from the deeper life that resides within us.

We all imagine there is a special place where we can find true happiness:

We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe

I may well be that some places facilitate our conversation with the universe. Personally I find a mountain wilderness the ideal place because there are no distractions. However, since that universe lies within us, all that is truly required is a quiet place to think. For Thoreau, the quiet of Walden Pond was such a place:

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

Thoreau spends considerable time talking about rising early to confront the day, to awaken to the wonder that awaits those who are willing and able to see what is there. Being a late riser who does his deepest thinking in the wee hours, I prefer to believe that he is talking about a “religious” awakening:

It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?

Thoreau rightly points out that most of us spend much of our time sleep-walking through life. We know he’s right because when we hear the accusation we immediately know it is true. Luckily, this accusation also serves as a wake-up call:

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

What would it take to awaken us?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

We are all capable of elevating our life if we consciously try, but until we make that conscious effort we will continue to sleep walk through life.

The clearest statement of Thoreau’s purpose for going to the woods is:

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.

In this sense, Thoreau’s retreat was not a religious escape from life to enhance his spiritual life, but, instead, an attempt to confront life directly. The essence of this Spartan approach to life is simplicity:

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

What could be simpler. Sounds like the same advice given by the great religions of the world. Unfortunately, it obviously isn’t as easy as it sounds, as most of us already know if we’ve tried to free ourselves from our possessions. Perhaps the greatest irony of America, the land of liberty, is that it also the land of capitalism, and the hardest thing in life is to free yourself from the constant desire to have things.

Unless we simplify, we are forced to rush to do all the things that we feel need to be done. According to Thoreau, we drive ourselves crazy:

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

It sounds to me like Thoreau is confronting that great American pragmatic philosopher, Ben Franklin, who seemed to offer very different advice.

It certainly seems that Thoreau would agree with Jonathon Delacour’s argument that bloggers should not desire to be called journalists:

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

I have no idea what passed for “news” in Thoreau’s day, but it could hardly be worse than what we call news, particularly television news. Instead of providing us with the knowledge we need to make vital decisions, it attempts to entertain us.

Thoreau argues that if we really paid attention to what is “true” in life that we would be exhilarated:

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.

While the “news” may well outrage us, poetry provides the kind of wisdom that makes real change possible. Certainly it requires far greater wisdom to solve the complex problems that face us than the newspapers with their insistence on the sensational will ever provide us with.

Men seek far and wide for the truth, thinking that they can find it “out there,” but according to Thoreau the truth is always at hand:

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.

To me, the most interesting phrase here is “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions,” suggesting that we somehow shape our own universe. Or, is it simply that if we conceive of the universe rightly that it will confirm our conception?

If we contemplate time correctly, we can see forever:

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.

Walden Pond is yet another body of water that offers a chance to gain new insights into eternity.

“Where I Lived, and What I Lived for”

Lest readers get the impression that Thoreau was something of a hermit, living by himself in a cabin a few miles from town, consider the first page of Chapter two wherein he revealed “I dearly love to talk,” as he hiked about the country, acting something like a real estate agent, connecting buyers with sellers of farms.

On one of his walks, Thoreau found a farm he especially liked–the Hollowell farm which he nearly purchased until Mrs. Hollowell decided not to sell.

Every man has such a wife–changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him.

Thoreau graciously refused the money, releasing Mr. Hollowell from the sale.

But the attraction of the farm remained for him.

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring;… I was in haste to buy it…and do all those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it.

Preservation of the farm was uppermost in Thoreau’s mind, not the development of the acreage. His plan was to “As long as possible live free and uncommitted. In fact failing to purchase the farm led him to comment

I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.

Escaping the ownership of the farm, Thoreau agreed to live on Emerson’s newly purchased land located away from the village among the natural setting of the pond and the woods surrounding it. He especially liked the song birds that inhabited the spot.

The Harivansa says, ‘An abode without birds is like a meat without seasoning.’

He felt he had “caged” himself near them as he sat within the doorway of his cabin, listening to their songs.

Life on Walden Pond sounds idyllic to me.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to made my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with nature herself…I got up early and bathed in the pond…’Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.’

Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.

The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour…After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make.

The influence of Eastern philosophy is apparent as Thoreau quoted the Vedas:

‘All intelligences awake with the morning.’

Thoreau recognized the difficulty for those of us who are not morning persons.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. [Be awake and alive] an infinite expectation of the dawn.

Man’s ability to adapt to his situation is a recurring theme for Thoreau.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor…it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Once more in this chapter Thoreau states a purpose for his sojourn to the banks of Walden Pond.

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…to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

Simplicity is another recurring theme.

Out life is frittered away by detail…Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity…keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

The act of keeping things simple should also extend to government. Thoreau recognized his philosophy was in conflict with progress.

But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads?…Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

Thoreau would answer if we stay at home and minded our own business, we wouldn’t want railroads.Answer to question number two would be we shouldn’t.

The post-office and newspapers were next on Thoreau’s list of “unnecessaries.’

I could easily do without the post-office…To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life…that were worth the postage…And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.

Here is the point:

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,–
and petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature…determined to make a day of it.

To find the reality in life remains the goal.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business…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.

The chapter ends with the confession that Thoreau meant to spend as little time as possible laboring.

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.

Freeing time to think, to read, to write, then, became the basis for Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond.

Diane McCormick