Kathryn Schulz’s article in this week’s New Yorker led me to consider my own relationship to Walden—a text as misconstrued by the public, according to Schulz, as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” For decades I resisted reading it. I had started once, and been turned off by Thoreau’s expense ledger and Yankee glee at getting his lumber cheap. He didn’t mention that he was building on borrowed land, or that he’d set Walden woods on fire the year before.
My husband had a replica of Thoreau’s cabin built on our property in Maine. When we moved, the cabin moved too. On the west wall is the Transcendentalist version of a piece of the true cross—a speck of plaster and crumb of brick from the original. Roland Robbins, who describes unearthing the cabin site in Discovery at Walden, had saved these artifacts on his property in Lincoln. In the mid 1980s, when land abutting the pond was threatened with development, Robbins raised money for Walden Forever Wild by gluing them to a plaque decorated with a quotation from Walden. He sold us one for $100. Later, Don Henley of the Eagles founded the Walden Woods Project and raised enough money to prevent any acquisitions by Mort Zuckerman. Robbins died soon after; what happened to his plaques and what was left of Thoreau’s materials is anyone’s guess. I suppose, as with any relic, there’s no knowing what’s real and what manufactured by a crafty seller.
Last summer I decided to remedy my apostasy by finishing Walden. I expected pages of anecdotes beginning, “Today I saw a woodchuck/loon/hawk/dragonfly.” But the first half of the book is a painfully explicated philosophy of denial, abstinence, and a hankering after purity that surprised me. It’s a young man’s book, although by the standard of his time Thoreau was not young when he wrote it. But I see him as a young, sick, dying man, dying to penetrate life while he kept it, while repudiating the body of life he knew, on some level, he would soon leave.
Colder then than now, Concord’s climate affected Thoreau’s philosophy. He agrees with Justus von Liebig that “Man’s body is a stove,” and that “animal life” is nearly synonymous with “animal heat.” But Thoreau cannot bear to be a hot, human animal. As a carnivore, he’s ashamed of himself. He’d prefer not to eat at all: as “creatures of appetite… to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.” Appetite includes dominion. When he objects to the owner of Baker Farm naming Flint’s Pond after himself—how many times have I driven past Baker Farm Bridge Rd. on my way to the auto repair shop!—he calls the farmer “unclean.”
Sometimes Thoreau senses the world’s glory like Whitman (or Whitman echoes him): “In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here…And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us.” Sometimes he prefigures Horace Mann, or a Montessori teacher: “Which would have advanced most at the end of the month,—the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had attended a lecture on metallurgy…and had received a Rodger’s pen-knife from his father?” But often he’s as much at war with nature as a Puritan in the wilderness, sunk in the great shame of being: “If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome.”
Midway through the book, like a reader of the Odyssey reaching Chapter 9, I finally find “Today I saw a woodchuck.” In “Winter Animals,” Thoreau’s observation of ice on the pond is what I craved from the get-go: “If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom…These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice.” Thoreau the scientist sounds the pond’s depths—he ridicules the rumor that Walden is “bottomless”—and maps it, producing two elegant sketches. Loveliest, to my ear, is his chapter on the ponds. His description of ripples: “Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling dimples…as it were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast.” Walden breathes; its heart beats, its blood flows.
Like Emily Dickinson, Thoreau expected “the Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, ‘The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court-yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.’ I often performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the town.” Yet I would argue Thoreau was Visited.
Here’s an excerpt from Roland Robbins’s description of the day in 1945 he located the site of Thoreau’s cabin. He’s just found the mortar and brick he’s been digging for. An army sergeant approaches, asking what he’s doing.
“Sorry to bother you, sir, but you see, I’m a distant relative of Henry David Thoreau. I live in California and I am on my way home from the European Theater of Operations. I have never been here before—may never get here again—so naturally I am anxious to learn what I can of Walden.”
“You mind my asking your name?” I inquired.
“I am Henry David Thoreau, Jr.” he replied.
Robbins’s discovery came 100 years, 3 months, and 24 days after Thoreau first settled in.