All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.
Henry David Thoreau
I first encountered Henry David Thoreau’s Walden at the end of my senior year of college. When I say encounter, I meant that I read it for the first time, though I had heard much about it from others, preemptively determining it contained the musings of a crazy transcendentalist who went to live in a cabin in the woods just to make a point.
I expected to write him off as a tree-hugging hippie of a previous generation, picturing him as a scruffy-bearded man with a dirty face, no shoes, and wild eyes. He would attempt to talk to animals, of course, and would during the course of the winter go so crazy that he might even think they answered back with curious prophesies and pronouncements against society. He would then write these annunciations in his notebook, get them published as a novelty, and become the saint of my own generation of tree-huggers. So I thought.
I was already fed up with the hippies around me. I heard enough assertions of the perfection of nature, enough of calls to be one with the world, enough with global warming. While college students at Colorado State University were writing vows on their graduation sashes promising to fix human damages in nature, I wrote papers about the dangers of alternative fuels and the benefits of controlled hunting. The news, full of predictions of doom in the form of burning rainforests, extinct species, and the dissipating ozone, weighed on my soul. Yes, the world is going to hell, I thought. So why does everyone keep talking about it as if they are surprised? Crazy would be to think that nature really is perfect, to think that we can fix it through rash action, and to say that one only needs to go into the woods by themselves and build a cabin by a pond to fix things.
But instead of crazy musings, in Walden I found a surprising wholeness of mind, of purpose, and of art. It was, in an odd way, beautiful. Thoreau included annoyingly small and seemingly inconsequential details, like the changing temperature of his beloved pond over the course of the spring. He told me how he made his house, down to the last shingle, and of what material, and with what tools. But he did so with the grace and firm tangibility of poetry. I unexpectedly lost myself in his cadences and imagery, listening to the song of his words in my head as I watched along with him Walden changing through the seasons.
I found instead of a crazy hippie a nonetheless strange man who sat by a pond for two years and watched. Watched ice form and melt. Watched birds and furry creatures come and go. Watched trees grow and seasons change the colors month by month. He listened, too. To the boom of the ice on the pond as it thawed in spring. To the songs of the birds. To the different voices of the wind in the trees and in his chimney.
Hippies wish to melt themselves into nature, to become no different from the trees and the ground and the animals, to lose their individual consciousness in the greater consciousness of the whole of nature. Hippies hate their humanness and pray to be anything else. Thoreau, on the other hand, placed himself within nature in order to be a part of it, but not to lose himself. Rather, he saw his project as a finding of something about life, an escape from slavery into true humanity. In his own words: “I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (85). Here was not a hippie seeking to meld himself with nature. Here was a man carefully observing nature to learn what it might teach him about his own life.
And, to my surprise, I found I could not dismiss him because I saw him in myself.
My Walden has always been the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Every summer, my father would take our family on camping and backpacking expeditions, exploring the depths of river valleys and the heights of twelve thousand-foot peaks. I took my first backpacking trip to Twin Lakes when I was eight years old. Of that memory I have retained only the colors: emerald moss framing the crystal flow of a glacier melt trickle. Shining black mica flakes like flashing animal eyes among the white sand on the trail. Dead, rusted pine needles. The deep blue of a sky very narrowly separating us from space.
Since that first trip, I have dedicated myself to learning my mountains. I know the names of the animals and plants, and dangerous and friendly, poisonous and edible. I know the dangers of the weather and the things I must bring with me into the wilderness in order to survive. I know the names of each peak and the shape of their crags by heart.
But more than just learning about the mountains, I have lived them. As Thoreau says about students of anything, “they should not play life, or study it merely…but earnestly live it” (47). Like Thoreau, I have stayed and watched and listened. I have heard the roars of waterfalls reverberating from granite cliffs like the vibratos of opera basses. I have listened to the illusive lark bunting call for a mate from the dwarf junipers on windswept tundra. I have watched the bud of a columbine open and tracked the hoof prints of a deer to the hiding place of her fawns. I have heard the song of the wind in the lodge pole pines, I have smelled the cinnamon on the bark of the fir, I have tasted the sour sweetness of tiny grouse berries.
Thoreau knew Walden, and in knowing Walden, he knew himself. He did not write about nature. He wrote about place, planting himself beside a pond and becoming an intentional part of that landscape, allowing it to impress his imagination and feed him with its silences and sounds, its breathings in and out. In this place, Thoreau learned less about nature than about human existence. He saw living in his place not as a return to perfection or even goodness, but as a return to the simplicity desperately needed by the human soul.
I also have embedded myself in a place, a place where my imagination has been planted, where, as Barbara Kingsolver describes it, my stories come from. And like Thoreau, I have learned from that place several things about what it means to live.
In terms of my agreement with him, it seems that both he and I acquired a greater appreciation for the simple things of life, namely food, clothing, and shelter, from knowing the wild. When you must work for it, food becomes something you notice you are eating instead of a three-times-a-day habit of consumption. You eat when you are hungry, and you realize that eating anything requires a process of finding and cooking, sometimes even catching and cleaning. You know your food intimately, down to its very innards.
Clothing also takes on completely different associations. In civilization, the clothes you wear have more to do with how you wish to appear than with their more practical functions of temperature regulation and protection from the elements. In the wild, clothing fulfills these practical functions first and foremost. One wears the oldest and most comfortable articles one can find, these clothes being the best for climbing and hiking and chopping and cleaning and staying warm without worries about stains or rips. Clothes lose their associations with fashion and become important only in their care for the people that are in them. After all, Thoreau reminds us, “it is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it [clothing], which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people” (23). One becomes much more concerned with character than a sense of style. I say with Thoreau: “…if my jacket and trousers, my hat and my shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not?” (20) When one worships God on the mountaintop, a little mud on jeans or a sweatshirt that has never really fit right no longer matter at all.
Most congruent with my own views and least hippie-ish of all, I found, was Thoreau’s understanding of shelter. He knew his human place within nature. When I camp, no matter how much good will I have towards nature, I must bring a tent to keep out the cold and the wind and the rain. In the same way, Thoreau did not strip off all his clothes and wander into the woods, expecting to be accepted and to survive on the grace of “Mother Earth.” Instead, he worked to build his home, even cutting down trees (gasp!) in order to do so. He recognized his finitude, not as something that disconnected him from nature, but as a fact that connected him to the similar finitude of other living things.
This understanding serves as the pinnacle of my agreement with Thoreau: his recognition that nature, just like human society, is not a utopia, but that beauty can still be found by living in the present moment of a place. One should enjoy life and beauty where they find them, not looking for perfection, but rather living intentionally in the moment. Thoreau knows that nature is not perfect, that he is finite, that if he runs out of food or gets too cold he will die. He knows that he must also kill other finite organisms in order to live. In other words, he knew as well as I that the world is going to hell. And, contrary to what the hippies might want to believe, he didn’t seem too worried about it. In fact, he rather enjoyed it, because it gave him something to think about.
This is because his musings did not focus on man’s destruction of the earth, but rather on man’s destruction of himself. Though he cared about Walden Pond, he did not live there in order to write a book about it and make the local people appreciate its beauties. Yes, in the process he did live in a way that was kind to the nature around him; his natural setting was vital to his lifestyle and therefore his philosophy. But his point did not center upon nature. It rotated around himself, not the entire world. It focused on simplicity, a word that should not be considered synonymous with conservation. It also focused on the present, not the future. He did not proclaim himself as a squatter in order to keep bulldozers from destroying the forest. He went to Walden to live his life in a way that he felt was the best way for people, namely himself, in freedom. To live deliberately.
And yet this is the point where I must disagree with Thoreau: his view of what it means to live free and deliberately.
I have an argument against him only because his lifestyle has so tempted me. Whenever someone asks me about a particularly stressful or busy day, I simply say that it is a llama farm day. If they are a member of my family or a close friend, they know this means that I am strongly considering quitting everything I am doing, buying land somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and ranching alpacas and llamas for their wool. I came up with this idea after seeing an infomercial where a happy older lady was standing with her cute, clean, fluffy alpaca and smiling. “I’ve never regretted owning alpacas,” she said through her perfect dentures. “They’re the best decision I ever made.” On the tough days, and even on the not-so-tough days, I want to be that lady, not because llama ranching sounds like the best job ever, but because it sounds so…free. Away from the city, peaceful, and without worries about bosses and coworkers and deadlines. Keeping my llamas happy would be my biggest concern.
Thoreau’s Walden reminds me somewhat of that infomercial. I see Thoreau standing in the woods, a big smile on his face, with the background of the pond behind him. “I’ve never regretted moving to this pond,” he says. “It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.” And it’s tempting, for a moment. I want to leave my responsibilities behind, just go to the woods to live deliberately. I want to live in the freedom of very few material possessions, hardly any obligations, and all the time in the world. I would love to simply observe one place in nature day after day after day. But I cannot listen to this sell.
Thoreau’s freedom is not true freedom because it is a running away from, not a running toward. Though he would like to make it seem as if he is creating for himself a better life, that he really knows what he is looking for at Walden Pond, I see him escaping, rather, a life he does not like. I hear him rail against those who laughed at him for his shabby clothes. I see him shake his fist at the landlords who hassled him for the monthly rent. I listen to him addressing over and over again those who did not think he could live at Walden Pond without going crazy. This is not freedom. This is enslavement to bitterness towards the customs of a culture.
Given, some of his criticisms of that culture are valid. In fact, I think that most of them are worth consideration. We should not consider clothes to be more important than character. People should live more simply and cheaply than they currently believe they can. Most men do “labor under a mistake,” forgetting that they will soon be “ploughed into the soil for compost” (3). But railing against such things does not prove freedom. It simply proclaims a personal philosophy that seeks to point out the problems. Thoreau’s time at Walden simply gave him the opportunity to think about and write out those personal philosophies, not to prove them.
This argument against Thoreau has been made before, but I’m going to make it again: one cannot seek to reform society unless they are a part of that society. Thoreau’s arguments fall flat because he has isolated himself. His infomercial does not sell.
But my argument goes beyond this. I will not fall into the same trap as Thoreau and simply argue against him without looking toward what I am preferring as a solution. Instead, I must consider how I can continue to see his criticisms as valid even while choosing to not mimic his reaction.
Living against these issues Thoreau raises does not mean one must pull away from society altogether. In fact, it means just the opposite. It means living life in society with a different perspective, a different focus, a different direction than everyone else. It is a remembrance that we will be compost. It is a living frugally and giving the extra to those who need it. It is a close observation, a quietness of soul, a paying attention. It is, in fact, a living deliberately.
This type of living deliberately is more challenging than the sort that builds a cabin in the woods and escapes society. It requires that we integrate our deliberateness into our daily business, our every choice, our interaction with others. We must combat the forces of society that tell us we must keep striving for more, whatever that “more” may look like, for no apparent reason. We have to think deeply and pay close attention to the world around us for glimpses for those things that are truly important.
Perhaps Thoreau himself knew that his time at Walden was not the answer, but only the space for the development of his ideas. His best explanation for leaving Walden after only two years of residence is vague at best: “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one” (302). In other words, Thoreau admits that Walden constituted the fulfillment of an internal desire, the pursuit of a dream, a short experiment in living. Those two years at Walden Pond were only a period, a space in his life, not the entirety of his life, and he knew it.
It is for all these reasons that I praise Thoreau and assert he is not a crazy hippie even while I don’t pick up my life and move to the woods. Perhaps someday I will fulfill my dream of owning land and ranching livestock in the mountains. But in the meantime, I do not neglect Thoreau’s idea of living deliberately even as I finish college and get a nine-to-five. Instead, I remember our agreements about the beauties of nature and the benefits of living within that beauty, our mutual acknowledgment of finiteness and the reality of death. I seek Thoreau’s perspective of humility, acknowledging that the more I know, the more in danger I am of knowing nothing useful. After all, Thoreau says, “how can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?” (4) I will continue to spend time in my mountains, being reminded that “a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors” (35). And, above all, I will attempt “to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line” (14). In other words, Thoreau and I, in disagreement and agreement, will be living life together. Deliberately.
All quotations from:
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004. First ed. 1854.
