The young Henry Thoreau proved skillful at navigating the arcane, point-based merit system at Harvard College—in addition to academic prowess, students were evaluated in terms of chapel attendance, classroom deportment, and the color of their coats—and graduated, in 1837, an exemplary member of his class. Students had opposed the retrograde nature of the college for years, most notably in the eruption of 1834 known as the Dunkin Rebellion, resulting in the expulsion of almost the entire sophomore class. But the man whose name would come to be linked with disobedience was also an impecunious student who couldn’ t afford not to toe the line. Of the sixty-seven members of his class, Thoreau numbered one of just nineteen never to have been formally disciplined.
His standing earned him a chance to speak at commencement exercises, and on the last Wednesday in August, before an assembly that included faculty, students, and the governor of Massachusetts, the twenty-year-old Thoreau took the podium to denounce the “blind and unmanly love of wealth” that characterized America’ s commercial spirit, urging in its place a cultivation of the “moral affections” requisite for independence. “The order of things should be somewhat reversed,” he insisted. “The seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul,—in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of nature.”
Thoreau may have had the year’s economic downturn in mind. Unchecked speculation over westward expansion had combined with widespread crop failures to produce what was then the worst financial panic in the nation’ s history. In later years, several Boston Transcendentalists—the labor-class champion and Thoreau’ s early mentor Orestes Brownson among them—would condemn the vagaries of the market and advocate the reorganization of society on a more equitable basis. But what is notable about Thoreau’s speech is his focus on individual reformation and communion with nature. Eight years later, at Walden Pond, he would conduct an experiment in deliberate living—what his most recent biographer (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Laura Dassow Walls, calls “a sacred commitment to confront…the conditions of possibility for life itself.” But as early as the summer of 1837, Thoreau had retreated for six weeks with his friend Charles Wheeler to a makeshift hut by Flint’s Pond, in nearby Lincoln, where they loafed at their ease, reading and conversing, or simply letting their thoughts drift amid the splendors of the season’s foliage. Far from an evolving worldview, Thoreau’s independence and love for the natural world were evident prior to his graduation from Harvard.
The ever-present risk when writing about Thoreau is that of reducing him to the two experiences for which he is best remembered: his twenty-six months living at Walden Pond, during which time he produced his first book and much of the manuscript that would become Walden, and the night he spent in Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against the American war with Mexico. Walls laments how successive generations “have invented two Thoreaus, both of them hermits… .One speaks for nature; the other for social justice,” and sets about dispelling the myth that Thoreau lived the life of an antisocial outsider.
Walls is additionally concerned with situating that life in geological time, emphasizing Thoreau’s exposure to the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch, the period referred to by scientists as the moment humans began to physically alter the planet through industrial activity. “For 11,000 years,” she notes, “indigenous people adapted to [the] evolving landscape,” but by Thoreau’ s time Americans had begun adapting the landscape to suit their needs as consumers and producers in an expanding market economy. The Concord railroad arrived in 1844, cutting past a corner of Walden Woods the year before Thoreau moved to the pond. Everywhere trees were being cleared for lumber, causing drainage and irrigation problems. When traveling up Maine’ s Penobscot River in a birchbark canoe, Thoreau observed firsthand the profusion of sawmills and lumber camps that comprised part of the “great machine” of modern industry steadily permeating the region’ s uninhabited wilderness. No matter how far he penetrated the wild, the “trail of the white man” often remained frustratingly evident. By contrast, and in closer keeping with his ideal, Thoreau cherished the quiet hours at Walden where “each night he fell asleep to the sounds of wind and wild animals, and each dawn he awoke to a world humans did not dominate.”
Walls writes with a clear passion for her subject, but her prose is often marred by the unfortunate tendency to round off paragraphs with a flowery lyricism, such as her description of Thoreau’ s time at Walden as a move “to his house of one, out on the shore among the pines that made the drapery of his dreams.” She tends to employ frequent hyperbole, as in her description of Thoreau as “the one person in America who could make poetry and science not two things but one,” or her claim that “no American writer is more place centered than Thoreau,” and that to take him away from Concord would make him “a different person.” This latter point would be true of any American writer: it is difficult to imagine the same Emily Dickinson on one of Herman Melville’s whaling vessels, just as it is to think of Melville living as a recluse in Amherst. At times the hyperbolic slips into the nonsensical, as when Thoreau’s original draft of Walden is described as “a book about nature,” but its later revision becomes “a book that would be nature.” This attempt to gild every lily results in an unevenness of tone that tends to diminish, rather than enhance, the natural grandeur of an already grand subject.
More problematic is Walls’s attempt to “bring Thoreau alive for our time,” a narrative strategy that runs the risk of personalizing Thoreau beyond historic proportion, seeing in him a part of ourselves, or ourselves as the future embodiment of ideas he helped popularize. It is dubious, for instance, that Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond “became and would forever remain an iconic work of performance art”; that “from then on, there would [be] no casual meetings with Henry T” because he had become a “product of modern commerce and communications: a celebrity.” Nothing in the historical record suggests Thoreau saw himself as undertaking a performance in this sense, nor that others saw him that way. Rather, Walls imposes a contemporary understanding of art and celebrity on the cultural milieu of the 1840s. It is true that many of Concord’s citizens thought Thoreau an oddity, and his time at Walden may have encouraged that impression. But this is a far cry from claiming Thoreau’s status as a proto-celebrity in the twenty-first-century sense. If anyone was a celebrity in Concord at the time, it was a more established figure like Emerson, who, precisely because of his public lecturing and publications, was popular across America and well known in Europe. Thoreau’s life was lived in relative obscurity, his reputation only enhanced after his death.
More in keeping with the subtlety of the man, Walls takes note of Thoreau’s “many-sided, paradoxical” nature. Emerson also identified his friend’s tendency to become most conversationally alive when challenging the convictions of others, and the impression was seconded by Margaret Fuller’s younger brother Richard, who traveled with Thoreau on his walk to Wachusett: “Thoreau abounded in paradox. This led me to review the grounds of opinion rather than change them. I saw it was his humor, and his vane would whip around and set in the opposite quarter if the world should conform to his statements.” Thoreau adopted this oppositional stance not only with others but also toward himself; in a way, he was never at rest. Known for walking at least four hours a day, Thoreau’s mind was also in daily motion. He lived by the searching stride of the philosopher, most alive when not at peace, always questioning his own presumptions to opinion, having taken permanent residence in a dueling, inner space resonant with the capacity for entertaining contradiction, what Keats immortalized as an expression of “Negative Capability.”
This sensibility led Thoreau to draw conclusions scarcely approached by most others. Walls relates how his 1846 hike up Maine’s Mount Katahdin “deepened his sense of kinship with the physical world around him.” She defines this moment as “a revolution in his consciousness,” but it may be better understood as a solidifying of his previous thinking. In 1837, Thoreau’s observation of recurrent patterns in nature led him to postulate that both leaves and ice crystals “were the creatures of but one law.” He expanded this idea in his 1842 “Natural History of Massachusetts” to ponder: “Would it not be as philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a crystallization more or less rapid?” Before Darwin, Thoreau was attempting to understand the relations between disparate forms of matter—and, before modern-day cognitive science, the relation between the workings of his own mind and the material world. This urge to uncover a primary substance, or force, is as old as Thales and the pre-Socratics, and it was no more original to human thought than it was revolutionary to Thoreau in 1846 when he hiked Mount Katahdin.
Of greater interest is just how radically Thoreau’s thinking contrasted with that of his contemporaries. Congregationalists and Transcendentalists of all stripes feared what a mechanized universe implied for the significance of human life and the possibility for morality. The Unitarian James Freeman Clarke had discouraged all efforts “to explain soul out of sense” by “deducing mind from matter.” Similarly, Orestes Brownson explained his purpose in launching the new Boston Quarterly Review as “seeking something profounder and more inspiring than the heartless sensualism of the last century”—that is, the eighteenth century of Enlightenment. The Trinitarian James Marsh provides an effective summary of the period’s general anxiety: “So long as we hold the [empirical] doctrines of Locke and the Scottish metaphysicians,” we can “make and defend no essential distinctions between that which is natural and that which is spiritual,” nor “even find rational grounds for the feeling of moral obligation.”
Thoreau rejected the claustrophobic methods of these theologically inspired thinkers. What is more, through daily, intimate communication with nature, he personalized and made emotionally vital what to other Transcendentalists remained a mere abstraction: nature as a “symbol” of the divine. In his first book, Emerson had written that “nature is the symbol of spirit.” Thoreau countered, in his own first book, “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” He possessed an Aristotelian devotion to the concrete study of nature, at variance with Emerson’ s Platonic flights of symbolic fancy.
Yet all the while, Thoreau never lost his sense of awe toward himself as a participant in the natural world. “How much virtue there is in simply seeing,” he marveled. “What a piece of wonder a river is.” And he never pitted the sublimity of conscious experience against his empiricism. Following his trip to Katahdin he wrote, “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.” And again, “What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!” Thoreau ultimately concludes that “all material things are in some sense man’ s kindred, and subject to the same laws with him.” By collapsing the Cartesian categories separating “spirit” and “matter,” Thoreau anticipates Whitman’ s all-encompassing humanism in “Song of Myself”: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
It is an American misfortune that Thoreau continues to be academically neglected in favor of his more famous European contemporaries. Aside from the occasional course in nineteenth-century history or early American philosophy, he is barely read beyond “Civil Disobedience” and excerpts from Walden. As a celebration of Thoreau’s life and ideas, Walls’s book is a welcome counterweight to many years of scholastic neglect. In his eulogy for Thoreau, Emerson anticipated how his friend’s death would be little noted but long remembered: “the country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.” Emerson implied that the nation would eventually come to value Thoreau’s considerable gifts, not least among them his contribution to American literature.
April 2019. This review is in Chicago Review 62.1/2/3.