Robert Sullivan wrote a book called The Thoreau You Don’t Know. In this book, Sullivan explains that
the image that most people have of Henry David Thoreau is wrong. I happened to
not learn much from this book, because I got my knowledge of Thoreau from
reading introductions to his work written by competent historians, but I’ll bet
there are many people who have very inaccurate views of what kind of person
Thoreau was and what he did and for whom this book would be quite valuable.
Many people think that Thoreau went to Walden to be out in
the wilderness, because he saw human society as something separate from Nature.
This image is reinforced by the misquotation often associated with Thoreau, “In wilderness is the salvation of the world.”
Thoreau said preservation, not salvation; and he said wildness, not wilderness.
He meant, as Sullivan tells us, not wilderness away from man but wildness even
within a human landscape. But when Thoreau built his shack near Walden Pond, he
was not “in the wild.” The forest was actually an actively-harvested woodlot,
harvested not the least by Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the winter,
ice-cutters harvested big blocks of ice. A railroad passed nearby, and railroad
workers lived there. Thoreau did not project an attitude of “Just leave me
alone already.” He left a second chair by the door of his shack to invite
people to come and talk with him. He wrote not just about the wild things he
saw, but also about the things he noticed in the railroad cut. When he wrote
about his walk to Wachusett, he noted not only the plants and animals but also
the gunshots and the “kine” (cattle) that he heard and saw, as they were part
of the whole world around him. Thoreau was in favor of preserving some of the
woods intact—but sustainably harvesting lumber from the rest. As ecologist
Richard Primack points out, Thoreau wanted us to see nature even in a
human-dominated landscape. Most days, Thoreau walked into town to visit his
family or the Emersons. When he was in New York City, he enjoyed taking walks
with Walt Whitman through the streets. He was not alone in a cabin in the
woods.
Why, then, did Thoreau go out to Walden Pond and live in a
shack for two years? He was conducting an
experiment in how to live. What do you really need in order to be happy? A
big house? Fancy furniture? In this experiment, Thoreau removed one item of
civilized comfort after another; against which the life of a homeowner in
Concord was the control. He compared his frugal use of firewood to the enormous
amount that Emerson used. That’s why Thoreau kept track, down to the nearest
half cent, how much it cost him to do this. And, even though he may not have
actually been planning to write a book about his experience, he was thinking
continually about publication. In this way, I believe (although Sullivan did not
actually say this) you could think of Walden as the equivalent of Colin Beavan’s
No Impact Man or A. J. Jacobs’s A Year of Living Biblically: to see if
it could be done. At the very least, Thoreau was no misanthrope; his writing is
full of humor, and some people today take it far too seriously. Thoreau was the
kind of guy who today would hang out his clothes to dry and tell his
too-serious environmentalist buddies that he was using a solar-powered clothes
dryer. As Sullivan points out, if someone today wonders what kind of car would
Thoreau drive, he would probably answer their question with a question: How do
you know that your car isn’t driving you? Thoreau’s stuff is sometimes hard to
make sense out of—which is perhaps the effect Thoreau intended. To make you
think, rather than to give you clear instruction. In wildness is the
preservation of the world? What? However you interpret this statement, you will
probably be the wiser for the effort.
Sullivan also points out that we should consider that Thoreau’s
time was one of social disruption in the United States. During a period of
economic prosperity, people thought the banks were the ultimate pragmatic
security; but the severe recessions of 1837 and 1857 (which most readers of
Thoreau never heard of) disrupted this idea. Thousands of people went west.
Thoreau’s friend Horace Greeley said, “Go west, young man!” Why? Because there
aren’t any jobs in the east. Sullivan says the Oregon Trail was, in effect, a
long unemployment line. When Thoreau said that most people were leading “lives
of quiet desperation,” he might have been referring specifically to the fact
that they lived from one mortgage payment to the next. Or not. Well, if the
purpose of life is not to build a bank account, then what is it? This is what
Thoreau wanted to find out. We need to think about this today.
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