bewilderness: remembering thoreau and becoming an adult

Let me first confess that I am a new parent and therefore sleep deprived but also, therefore, immersed in the practicalities of raising a child and providing for his future.

I came to fatherhood later than most, for many reasons, but primarily because I have spent the better part of my life in school. As few as 21 months ago, books on Emerson, Thoreau, American religion and literature were heaped throughout my apartment. If you sat next to me at a party, you were sure to hear about how the corrosion of America could only be salved by a good dose of Emersonian perfectionism. Now, if I even get the chance to go to a dinner party, you wouldn’t even know that I’ve read a book in my lifetime and you might conclude that I can barely speak the English language as my wife and I now tend to talk in toddler-speak: “ha” for “hot,” “dodo” for “dog,” “wadat?” for “what’s that?” We’re not self-conscious about it; it’s just the linguistic environment within which we dwell. 

drawing by Emily Paul

And where my friends and I were once concerned with matters of aesthetics, wisdom, sources of spiritual knowledge, the meaning of meaning, and the meaning of life, we now talk about two things: nursery schools and money. As parents, we are devoted to growth, and, as we want our children to grow, so too do we want our money to, let us say, develop. And now I know why the adults in my life raised their eyebrows when I decided to go off to Scotland to study philosophy and then came back to study some more and then moved to NewYork to study some more. I once was dating a very nice young woman who suddenly stopped in mid-conversation one day and asked me just how much a college professor makes. Once told the paltry sum she might expect if we were betrothed, our conversation and soon thereafter our dating life just as suddenly came to end. Simply put, she knew what I know now, you need money to raise children. Philosophy might get you through a boring dinner party, but it doesn’t help you add to a 401(k). 

Now that my son sleeps through the night, eats regularly and spends his day happily cataloging everything in the world, I have had a few seconds to think. At the beginning of his tragic essay “Experience,” Emerson asks, “Where do we find ourselves?” I have always felt that this is the most important question we can ask and we must ask it as much as possible. I’ve started to ask it again. Last month, I found myself in Connecticut. My family was visiting the new home of our best friends and their two small children. My wife let me sleep in and the children were playing rowdily downstairs. When I woke, the first thing I saw was a cloudless blue sky etched with black lines of crisscrossing elm trees. I had not been back in Connecticut for a while, and I began to think of my childhood and how much time I had spent walking in the woods. I thought of Emerson and Thoreau and how as an adolescent and young adult I had read them voraciously, and how lately I had neglected this heritage of self-reliance and non-conformism. 

My thoughts were interrupted by a three year old girl in pink tights who opened the door to instruct me that I was a sick king and that I had to stay put in order to get better. She quickly exited what was now taken to be a royal chamber. Taking her advice, I embraced my new status, stayed in bed, and spied a volume of Thoreau on its back on a bookcase stuffed with boxes of CDs. I reached for the book and randomly opened to this quotation: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least,’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, ‘That government is best which governs not at all,’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” And then I read this: “Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.” And I thought to myself: Oh my, Thoreau could have been the speechwriter for Reagan and Gingrich. If he were around today, you might have seen him on a cable TV talk show railing against the dangerous conformity of any party or organization that stood in the way of self-reliance and tried to prejudice the individual’s personal confrontation with the world. As his friend, mentor, and sometimes employer Emerson commanded the young students at Harvard Divinity School: “Dare to love God without mediator or veil.” Emerson, by the way, was banished from speaking at Harvard for this statement.

We don’t refer much to Thoreau or Emerson these days, though I think that we are still grappling with their core problem, that is: What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? I don’t know of any Republicans or Libertarians who talk about Emerson or Thoreau. Thoreau is still the quaint but intellectually neglected icon of the left, particularly the environmentalists. He has been exiled from his own arguments and dismissed to a sentimental, utopian region of nature-lovers and middle-class-society-haters. 

The Fifth Edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia summarizes Thoreau in this way: “A supreme individualist, he championed the human spirit against materialism and social conformity.” If one interprets the meaning of individualist as one man against every man, or a solitary isolationist, and if you mean by materialism, the deliberate, economic acquisition and cultivation of goods and services, then I must vehemently disagree. The truth that I have now grown up to realize is that such simplistic romanticism makes it difficult to live in the world as an adult with a clean conscience. 

The individualist, anti-materialist Thoreau was the great prophet of my family. On Sunday mornings, my parents would gather my brother and me and we would read selections from Walden. Where I grew up, he served as a symbol for non-conformity to societal oppression. In other words, he was the philosopher who taught us to do our own thing and to go with the flow. I now realize that I must banish this simplistic romantic Thoreau and restore the linkage between the pragmatic and the holy Thoreau. A book like Walden, if read as a philosophy of active living, is a much more practical guide that seeks to reject neither society nor the individual. Walden is as much a treatise on economics and business sense as it is a guide to nature. It is a book very much about making a living, but it turns that phrase around and discusses living a making, as it were. A consultant asked me the other day if I was a strategic thinker or just a bean counter. Thoreau was both. There is a part of Walden where he is literally counting beans. 

Emerson and Thoreau were interested in the way we live our lives as Americans and how the quality of our individual lives might create a new country. The United States is the most adolescent of countries, for it is always struggling with its identity. Severed, by definition, from tradition, and continually incorporating new peoples, our republic continues to exist in an agitated state of renewal and self-definition. Our quest for a lasting national identity is often tortured, sometimes violent, and rarely pleasant. We continue to ask the very questions posed by Emerson and Thoreau: What is the appropriate relationship between the individual and the community? What ought to be the relationship between ourselves and nature? We still seek that delicate balance between individual freedom and our responsibility to our neighborhood, city, state, and country. For Emerson and Thoreau the answer lay in the concept of a community of fulfilled individuals. 

So, how do you live authentically without rejecting your obligations and responsibilities? Thoreau exhorts us in Walden to live deliberately. He intended to show us how to live authentically and spiritually within a capitalist, mercantile society. We know that capitalism and Western religion have tugged at each other for centuries. Scholars have argued that North American Puritanism laid the foundations for a market economy. Thoreau is part of this tradition. In Walden, he continually spends and makes money and engages in trade and brags about his fiscal skills: “All things considered…I believe that I was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.” He details careful accounts of his expenditures. The first chapter of Walden is entitled “Economy.” 

All of this mercantile activity is a metaphor for deliberation, the key term for all of Walden. He pushes us to be as careful with our souls and with our relationship to creation as we normally are with our ledger books. (Note: Thoreau’s biographers claim that his name ought to be pronounced “thorough.”) Thoreau would have been disgusted by the Enron fiasco, not because the company made so much money, but because the accounting procedures were so murky. 

“Deliberate” comes from the Classical Latin deliberare, a word that involved scales and balances. For Thoreau, the deliberate life was more than a metaphor. All of the picayune details of our lives, from beans to washing our bodies to balancing our books, held significance and entailed the nature of relationship to the Divine. He sought the proper nexus of commerce, nature, and God. Listen to the following quotation from Walden that juxtaposes business and spirituality. Thoreau is seeking to link the merchant and the minister. He is an entrepreneur of the spirit and a spirited entrepreneur: 

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go to dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and In- dian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. 

If I showed Thoreau America’s unwearied, serene new housing developments, he would complain that we keep building more and more houses, but we are not developing better and better people to inhabit them. Thoreau celebrates house building, but he seeks to fuse appearance and reality, so that the industry and purposefulness of the contractors and their carpenters are met by industrious, hopeful people who come to live in their homes. 

Thoreau is on a personal errand and like his Puritan forefathers, he is on an errand for history. John Winthrop sought to establish a model “City on the Hill,” i.e. a Christian commonwealth that would show an evil Europe how to live correctly. Thoreau similarly but more modestly sought to establish a similar house in the woods by a pond. He was not escaping society, but modeling for it. Remember, Walden, the isolated pond, became Walden the book which was first a series of public lectures. Thoreau, all along, was demonstrating for an audience. His was an experiment for the benefit of all about how the economical life is the true philosophy. 

Thoreau oscillated between the public and the private and the town and the woods. Thoreau commuted back and forth between Concord and Walden Woods. His two years at Walden, I think, exemplified what Emerson meant by the life of a fulfilled individual. All in all, it was a very successful life, if we define “success” in terms of “succession” that is succeeding to the next level of skills and the next level of consciousness. Thoreau achieved tremendous economies. He built his cabin for just over $28. His largest expenditure was $3.90 for nails because he bent so many in the construction of the cabin. Thoreau spent only $8.74 on food, $2 on fuel, and just over $8 on clothing. He spent a mere $14 on tools for his garden. He eventually turned a profit selling vegetables. The claim is made that he made more on a percentage basis than any other farmer in Concord. Indeed, he found that he needed to work only six weeks out of the year to provide for himself. 

While at Walden, Thoreau was far from a hermit. He enjoyed frequent visitors, including Hawthorne, Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott, and he even hosted sleepovers and picnics in his little cabin. His family frequently visited him, and he attended many dinner parties in Concord. The children of Concord were quite attracted to Thoreau, and he often entertained groups of them at the pond. He became something of a local celebrity and curious strangers would often show up unannounced. He honed his surveying, carpentry, gardening, and fence building skills. He studied the environment and made experiments in natural science and refined his understanding of Greek. Thoreau performed comparative temperature studies of local ponds and rivers. (His biographer Walter Harding describes Thoreau as a man developing a mania for charts and graphs.) And always, always, he wrote. He began to give lectures about his life at the pond and these lectures formed the basis of his eventual classic book. In short, Henry David Thoreau’s life at Walden was a complete education in two short years in language, writing, history, science, and the practical arts. 

As the Iowan Marilynne Robinson points out, once we realize that Thoreau’s mother laundered his shirts, we tend to get cynical about Thoreau and start looking for hypocrisy in all of our American historical figures. But this cynicism is just a symptom of the romantic bifurcation that plagues our understanding of Thoreau. The Walden woods were not only a refuge from the gossip of sidewalks and the meanness and pettiness of human beings. The wild for Thoreau represented our complex mission. It was sometimes a monastery (as in the famous pun that he was “walled in” like the walled-in depictions of the Garden of Eden) and sometimes a laboratory. 

Thoreau exhorts us to take the destiny of our country in our own hands. He does not want a nation of academic philosophers, but ones whose lived lives are philosophical arguments. He says that to be a philosopher is “to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” Thoreau looks forward to a nation of deliberators who achieve wisdom by pounding a path, back and forth, between the pond and the lecture hall and the market place with stops in the homes of friends–a full life, fully examined. 

The little girl returned to my room and pronounced that the sick king had been cured. It was getting late, and I was hungry and a little lonely. I put Thoreau back next to the Quicken software, rolled out of bed and beat a path downstairs to a table full of pancakes and toddlers and sleepy parents and newspapers scattered all over the family room floor. 

All details of Thoreau’s life come from Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau.

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