Walden:
Or an Hour and a Half in the Woods
ONE IS WELCOMED to Walden Pond State Reservation by small ironies. Here is a hot dog truck engaging its economy in the parking lot (“I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.” – Henry David Thoreau). You proceed to the Walden Pond Shop, operated by the Thoreau Society (“Wherever man goes, men will pursue him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.” – H.D.T.). Is there a drinking fountain? you ask. No, but we sell bottled water.
I am not bothered by the ironies. In fact, a part of me appreciates them. They take some of the edge off of Thoreau’s capacity for sanctimony. Crossing the street and descending a gentle grade, Walden Pond emerges serenely before me, indifferent to hot dog stands and bottled water and the fractious tendencies of our species. The pond seems to attach to each of these things the significance a blue whale might grant to a barnacle.
Mine is a modern sort of pilgrimage, hasty and convenient. I have come to eat a sandwich and stick my feet in the water, to walk a mile and take a few photos before rocketing west along Interstate 90.
THOREAU LIVED AT Walden Pond for two years, from 1845-47. His purpose was “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.” Thoreau’s great gifts to the world were the sincerity of his intention and the quality of his attention. He would plumb the depths of his own soul much as he plumbed the depths of Walden Pond. He would study and observe the world around him to find his own place in it. Walden does not derive its evocative power from Thoreau’s experiment. Rather, Thoreau, by opening his eyes, his heart, and his mind to his surroundings, began to understand the tapestry of life and reminded us that we can do the same.
IT WAS A warm day, and New Englanders were reveling in the novelty of sunshine after six weeks of nearly continuous rain. The small beach and swimming area played host to a commotion of humanity that would have sent Thoreau packing in search of a more tranquil pond. But just a few hundred yards along the east shore, I found a quiet spot to settle for my picnic. I rolled up my pant legs and let the cool water lap at my ankles.
I looked out at the shallows and let my gaze go soft. Soon I noticed darting slices of electric blue a few inches above the water; dragonflies, a dozen or so, some hovering and others in a great deal of hurry. Here was an unreasonably long specimen, blue in front and gray from midsection down. Closer inspection revealed that here, in fact, were two dragonflies, engaged in a consummation that resembled the airborne refueling of a jumbo jet. After the act, the couple rested themselves upon a twig adrift in the water. The female arched her long body like an inchworm. I picked up a fallen leaf, still green and supple. The latticework of veins was a miracle. I held up the leaf to be backlit by the sun and invited a second miracle.
“WHOSO WOULD BE a man,” wrote Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, “would be a nonconformist.” Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond can be viewed as an effort to nourish and fortify his innate nonconformity. The practices of paring down his life to essentials, affording time for study and reflection, and intently observing nature helped foster in Thoreau strong conviction and a clear sense of self. He was by no means a hermit during this period, but his relative distance from convention provided space for Thoreau to grow into himself with confidence. It was Thoreau the nonconformist who with such searing eloquence condemned the ills slavery and articulated the principles of civil disobedience that would later influence Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Knowing his own mind enabled Thoreau to see many of the cruelties, the insanities, and the inanities of his own time for what they were. “All heroes are deviants,” maintains psychologist Philip Zimbardo. The trick is understanding where and why one deviates.
Both Emerson and Thoreau recognized how difficult it is to truly think for oneself and how disastrous the inability to do so can be. Perhaps it is this insight that I find the most urgently relevant for our times. If one agrees with our transcendentalist friends that developing a sense of self-understanding benefits from a certain amount of solitude and reflection, then it quickly becomes apparent that the modern era is not exactly hospitable to such an endeavor. Pace of life is ever quickening, our attention is seduced in a thousand directions by televisions, cell phones, emails, iPods, and billboards. Words, images, sound, and suggestion stream into our minds, all crafted to influence in one way or another. The bombardment is so steady and persistent that our conscious mind begins to tune out even as our subconscious continues to rake it all in.
The clear implication of Thoreau’s writings is that if we are not actively and vigilantly cultivating the capacity for nonconformity we are, in fact, ceding ground to conformity. If we fail to plumb our own depths, we are condemned to drift on the surface, susceptible to winds that would have us consume or hate or close ourselves off for reasons that are not our own. If we do not make a point of finding ourselves, society will make a point of keeping us lost from ourselves.
A SWIMMER STROKED methodically by and called my attention away from the dragonflies. I dried my feet and laced my shoes, continuing down the trail. A brilliant arc of red flashed before me—a scarlet tanager on his lunchtime rounds. A chipmunk scampered, and then froze. Scampered, and froze. I walked on and felt a lightness, as if things I carried that did not belong to me were sliding from my shoulders.
“That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.”
