What most people know about Henry David Thoreau comes down to this:
In 1845, he retreated from civilized life for two years and two months and “lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor… on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.” He was in his late twenties. The land was owned by his benefactor, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Several years after the experiment ended, he published a version of the journals he kept during this time. The book was called Walden.
People might also know that he did not, in fact, spend the entire year alone and that he had some occasional help sustaining himself. His mother, for example, did his laundry.
“Walden” has entered the American English vocabulary as a synonym either for voluntary isolation, self-sufficiency, and harmonious co-existence with Nature, or for hypocrisy and entitlement, depending upon whom you ask, but the popular use of the word has less to do with the book than is generally assumed. Of course, it is the record of voluntary isolation and relative self-sufficiency, but Thoreau also has much to say about things that are decidedly not a part of the nineteenth-century pastoral imagination.
Although it is a narrative of withdrawal, Walden is better understood as a reflection on industrial progress and how an individual inhabits a society increasingly defined by its economic relations. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Thoreau was observing the ever-more complex entanglements of modern life even as he tried to imagine a way out. His later, more explicitly political writings have their origins in the thinking worked out in his account of his social seclusion.
His answer to the question of how to live in a world that demands unacceptable moral compromises and how a citizen should resist systemic oppression was decided, in large part, by the experiment in living that is Walden. And so, exhibiting all of the virtues and all of the problems of American liberalism, Thoreau came to encapsulate their central contradiction in this desire to solve structural social and economic problems through heroic individualism and moral rigor.
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