Henry David Thoreau had a mind that was intelligent, complex,
and rigidly righteous. He was born in
Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, into a family of uppity Unitarian
abolitionists. After attending Harvard,
he worked as a schoolteacher for a few years.
Later, he lived with Ralph Waldo Emerson, serving as a tutor, handyman,
and editorial assistant. Emerson took
him under his wing, and encouraged his literary efforts. Emerson owned land on Walden Pond, and he
allowed the young man to build a cabin there.
Living by the pond led to experiences that inspired Thoreau’s classic, Walden.
Thoreau built the cabin at age 27, and moved out at 30. His thinking was not yet set in concrete, and
it wandered to many regions in the world of ideas, tirelessly searching for
eternal truth. He read the ancient
classics in Greek and Latin, and discovered that enlightened philosophers
preferred paths of voluntary simplicity.
He adored Native Americans, because they thrived in wildness and enjoyed
a simple life. He worshipped nature, and
loved spending time outdoors.
Unfortunately, he was born during a diabolical hurricane of what
is now called Sustainable Growth™.
Concord was becoming discord, as the ancient forest was replaced with
gristmills, sawmills, cotton mills, a lead pipe factory, and a steam powered
metalworking shop. It was rare to stroll
by Walden Pond in daytime and not hear whacking axes. Railroads were the latest fad for rich folks. Countless trees were hacked to death to
provide millions of railroad ties. By
1850, just ten percent of the land around Concord was forest, and wild game was
getting scarce.
Obviously, the residents of Concord were not philosophers
aglow with timeless wisdom. They were
also not wild folks who had lived in the same place for thousands of years
without destroying it. These new people
acted crazy! They were possessed, out of
their minds, infected with the highly contagious status fever. They burned up their precious time on Earth
in a furious struggle to appear as prosperous as possible — fancy houses, cool
furniture, trendy clothes. If a monkey
in Paris put on a traveler’s cap, then every monkey in America must do
likewise.
Thoreau was not impressed. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of
things which he can afford to let alone.”
In 1845, he moved into his tiny new cabin. He hired a farmer to plow two and a half
acres (1 ha), and then planted a bean field.
Using a hoe to control the weeds proved to be far more challenging than
his fantasy of humble simplicity. The
net income for a summer of sweat and blisters was $8.12, far less than
envisioned. He learned an important
lesson, and this experiment was not repeated.
A low-budget life of simplicity required a low-budget
diet. Thoreau’s meals majored in water
and unleavened bread made from rye and corn meal. Over time, he lost interest in hunting and
fishing. “I had rarely for many years
used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill
effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my
imagination.”
The second summer included a pilgrimage to Maine. He had a gnawing hunger for genuine wilderness
that Concord could not satisfy. He also wanted
to meet real live Indians, and be invigorated by their purity. Alas, Mount Katahdin was a rugged wilderness
without trails, and the philosopher from Harvard was shocked by how difficult
it was.
Big Mama Nature gave him a swift dope slap. In The
Maine Woods he recorded her harsh words. “I have never made this soil for thy feet,
this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and
then complain because you find me but a stepmother?” This nasty wilderness “was a place for
heathenism and superstitious rites — to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to
the rocks and to wild animals than we.”
His experience with the Indians also disappointed him. After 200 years of colonization, their
traditional culture had long been bludgeoned by smallpox, whiskey,
missionaries, and civilization. “Met
face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and
slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of
a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable
and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes
of the great city. The one is no more a
child of nature than the other.”
Sadly, Thoreau never experienced a community that was fully
wild, free, and at one with the land. He
returned to Walden, a tame and comfortable place, and buried some fantasies. He wasn’t at home in wilderness, and he
wasn’t at home in civilization. Could he
find peace somewhere in between? He soon
packed up his stuff, left the cabin, and returned to the Emerson home. He had learned a lot from 26 months of
solitude, but he was wary of getting stuck in a rut.
After eight years of work, and seven drafts, Walden was
published in 1854. It caught the world’s
attention, and he finally had a steady stream of income. Thoreau’s sister died of tuberculosis in
1849. His father died of tuberculosis in
1859. In 1862 it killed Henry, at the
ripe old age of 44.
He had spent his life trying to find a beautiful, healthy, and
ethical way of living. His education prepared
him for a life in civilization instead, loading his mind with myths, hobbles,
and blinders. Thoreau was well aware
that his society was on a dead end path.
Its citizens robotically submitted to the peer pressure of their
culture. They could imagine no other way
to live. The only thing they could
change was their clothes. Consequently
and tragically, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
His core message was “explore thyself” — question authority, question
everything, every day. Never assume that
you are crazy, and never assume that your society is normal and sane — it is
not! Stay away from status fever, and
the living dead that suffer from it. Go
outdoors! Live simply! Live!
Live! Live!
Thoreau’s world was deranged.
But viewed from the twenty-first century, it looks far less crazy than
our nightmare. He gathered chestnuts by
the pond, a species that would later be wiped out by blight. The skies were often filled with passenger
pigeons, now extinct. Millions of
buffalo still thundered across the plains.
He drank water directly from the pond.
There were no cars or aircraft. Most
folks moved by foot or horse. They did
not live amidst hordes of strangers, they knew each other. None spent their lives inside
climate-controlled compartments, staring at glowing screens.
Henry would have hated our world. His mission was to live as mindfully as
possible. “I went to the woods because I
wished 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.”
Sims, Michael, The
Adventures of Henry Thoreau, Bloomsbury, New York, 2014.
