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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Walter Harding
(1917-1996)
Five Ways of Looking
at Walden
[undated revision]
"Five Ways of Looking at
Walden" was
written as a lecture for 1962 annual conference of the New York
State English Council in New York City on May 2, 1962, but was
actually first delivered at a convocation at Keuka College on
March 26, 1962. It has been repeated on many college campuses
across the country. It first appeared in print in the special
Thoreau centennial issue of the Massachusetts Review 4
(Autumn, 1962) pp.149-162. This version of the text has been
slightly revised to bring it up-to-date and to modify a few of
my earlier opinions.
Although
Walden was not exactly a roaring success when it was
published in 1854- it took five years to sell out the first edition
of only two thousand copies it has become, in the century since,
one of the all-time best sellers of American literature. It has
been issued in nearly two hundred different editions with a number
of these editions having sold more than half a million copies each.
At this moment it is in print in many different editions in this
country alone as well as in English language editions in England,
India, and Japan and in translations into French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish,
Danish, Czechoslovakian, Japanese, Sanskrit and many other
languages. What are the causes of this phenomenal popularity?
For the past forty five
plus years
I have had the good fortune to be the secretary of the Thoreau
Society
one of the most unpredictable groups of individualists that
has ever united itself around a common enthusiasm. It is the only
literary society I know of where the professional teachers of
literature are vastly outnumbered by the non-professionals. Among
the regular attenders of our annual meetings are a stockbroker, a
retired letter carrier, a clergyman, an outspoken atheist, an
entomologist, an ornithologist, a music teacher, an archeologist, a
poet, a publishing company executive, a printer, a druggist, a
socialist organizer, a hardware store owner, a church organist, the
author of a book entitled Why Work? (each year he gets
permission from the local police to sleep on the front porch of the
Concord High School), a telephone company executive, a novelist, a
conservationist, an exponent of subsistence farming, a woman who
announces that she "covers the culture front in Brooklyn," a
professional mountain climber, a crime expert
that is, an expert in
solving crimes
the list could go on indefinitely." What is even more
interesting is that when these people have been asked to state why
they are sufficiently interested in Thoreau to make the annual
journey to Concord and some of our most regular attenders come from
as far away as Quebec, Florida, California, and Texas it is very
rarely that two give the same reason. They are interested in his
natural history his politics, his economics, his prose style, his
anarchism, his theology, and so on. The most phenomenal facet of
Thoreau's appeal and the appeal of his masterpiece, Walden
is
its tremendous breadth. Walden is read, not just for one
reason, but for many.
To most people, I
suppose, Walden is a nature book. Certainly back at the time
of its appearance it was almost universally considered to be a book
about natural history, and some of Thoreau's contemporaries were
annoyed that he allowed anything but nature to have a part in the
book. The lengthy opening chapter on "Economy', they fussed, was a
waste of time and should be skipped by the average reader. They also
suggested the reader skip over such philosophical chapters as "Where
I Lived and What I Lived For," "Higher Laws" and "Conclusion". When
Thoreau wrote about ants or loons or muskrats or pickerel or
squirrels or snow or ice, they argued he was superb. But
unfortunately, he was all too ready to go off into transcendental
nonsense comprehensible only to such "tedious archangels" as Amos
Bronson Alcott or to such "radical corrupters of idealistic American
youth" such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. But on the birds, the bees, the
flowers, and the weather Thoreau could write and did quite
superbly. The late 19th Century anthologies of American Literature,
when Thoreau is included, almost invariably print "The Battle of the
Ants" from the "Brute Neighbors" chapter of Walden or "The
Pond in the Winter."
I am not at all trying to belittle Thoreau as a nature
writer. I am simply stating that that was his first and widest
appeal and in fact, still is. In the second-hand bookstores of our
country the dealers more often categorize him as a nature writer
rather than as a literary figure or philosopher.
It has been claimed
and I think quite rightfully that he
invented the natural history essay and certainly his writings are
the standard by which all nature writers since his time have been
judged. He has successfully avoided the traps so many nature writers
fall into of being too cute, too sentimental, too technical, or just
plain dull. He never indulges in the pathetic fallacy of attributing
human characteristics to the lower classes of animals. Yet neither
does he write down to them. He accepts them for what they are and
writes about them on their own terms. He writes about them with wit
and humor but the humor is as often at the expense of himself and
his fellow man as at the expense of the animal. Take for example
that passage near the end of his chapter on "Brute Neighbors" in
which he talks about his checker game with the loon on Walden Pond:
As I was paddling along the
north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days
especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down,
having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one,
sailing out from shore toward the middle a few rods in front of
me set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a
paddle and he dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he
would take, and we were fifty yards apart when he came to the
surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and
again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than
before. He maneuvered so cunningly that I could not get within
half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the
surface, turning his head this way and that he coolly surveyed
the water and the land and apparently chose his course so that
he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and
at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how
quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution.
He led me at once to the widest part of the pond and could not
be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain,
I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty
game. played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a
loon. Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the
board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his
will appear again. Sometimes he will come up unexpectedly on
the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under
the boat.... Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached
the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre and instantly
dived again. I found that it was well for me to rest on my oars
and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he
would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes
over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his
unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much
cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up
by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray
him? He was indeed, a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly
hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also
detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever,
dived as willingly, and swam yet further that first.
But so much for Thoreau as a nature
writer.
A second appeal of
Walden is as a do-it-yourself
guide to the simple life. I think it highly significant that the
first real surge of interest in Thoreau in the twentieth century
came during the depression years of the nineteen-thirties when large
masses of people indeed almost all of us were required
willy-nilly
by the press of circumstances to adopt the simple life. We had no
choice in the matter, but Thoreau was one of the very few authors
who not only made this simple life bearable he even made it
appealing. A friend of mine said to me back in the thirties, "You
know, Thoreau is the only author you can read without a nickel in
your pocket and not be insulted."
What is perhaps more phenomenal that his appeal during
the depression years is the fact that in our present era of
super-materialism and status-seeking he still continues to make the
simple life appealing. Now I am not one who advocates that we all,
literally, go out and find our own Walden Ponds, build our own
cabins, and ignore civilization. It was only through a profound
misunderstanding of the book Walden that the idea that such
an abandonment of civilization was Thoreau's aim ever got into
circulation. He was very careful to say in the first chapter of
Walden:
I would not have anyone adopt
my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he
has fairly learned it I may have found another for myself, I
desire that there may be as many different persons in the world
as possible; but I would have each one be careful to find out
and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his
mother's or his neighbor's instead.
He himself lived at Walden only two
of the forty-four years of his life roughly about four per cent of
his life. He went to Walden Pond to live because he had a specific
purpose in mind the writing of a book that he found he did not have
time to write if he spent his time keeping up with the proverbial
Joneses. And when he finished writing that book (incidentally that
book was not Walden but its predecessor, A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers,) he left the pond as freely and as
happily as he had gone there.
Thoreau's philosophy of the simple life does not
advocate the abandonment of civilized life or a return to the
jungle. He simply points out that modern life is so complex that it
is impossible for each one of us to embrace all of it. We must of
necessity be selective. But unfortunately our standards of
selection tend to be imposed upon us by the society we live in
rather than based on our own personal interests and desires. We
live not our own lives but the lives imposed on us by those who
surround us. We keep up with the Joneses instead of ourselves. And
when we come to die, we discover we have not lived. How many of us
will be able to say as Thoreau did on his death-bed:
I suppose that I have not
many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I
may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret
nothing.
"And regret nothing." Those are the
key words. Are we able to say that honestly of our lives? Thoreau,
when he went to Walden Pond, said that he "wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life." And
because he determined what was the essence of life not for his
parents, nor for his neighbors but for himself, he was able to say
at the end of his life that he regretted nothing.
How then does one get at the essence of life? All of
Walden is devoted to answering that question. But perhaps we
can find it epitomized in a brief quotation from his chapter
entitled "Where I Lived and What I Lived For."
Our life is frittered away by
detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten
fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the
rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be
as two or three , and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your
thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life,
such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one
items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, he would not
founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead
reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary
eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and refuse other
things in proportion.
Let us spend one day as
deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off track by every
nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise
early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let
company come and let company go, let the bells ring and let the
children cry, determined to make a day of it....Why should we knock
under and go with the stream?...Let us settle ourselves , and work
and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion,
and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe through Paris and London, through
New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through
poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom
and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is
and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below
freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or
a state , or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a
Nilometer, but a Realometer, that futures ages might know how deep a
freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time...Be
it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying,
let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the
extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
A third facet of Walden is
its satirical criticism of modern life and living. Strangely enough
this is one side of Thoreau that is sometimes misunderstood by the
reader. Some take everything Thoreau says literally and seriously,
ignoring the fact that the book's epigraph reads:
I do not propose to write an ode to
dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning,
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
Even as astute a critic as James
Russell Lowell made the rather astounding statement that Thoreau had
no sense of humor. And if one does not see Thoreau's humor, he can
be assured that he is missing or worse mis-reading a major portion
of Walden.
A large portion of Walden cannot
or at least
should not be read literally. Thoreau had a rollicking sense of
humor and used it extensively throughout the pages of his
masterpiece. He used just about every humorous literary device on
record puns, hyperbole, slapstick, mockery, parody, burlesque, and
so on. And just about every one of these devices was used with
satirical intent. It is true that now and then he gets off a pun
just for the pun's sake such as that worst or best of
all puns in
the chapter on "The Ponds" where he speaks of the patient but
unlucky fishermen at Walden Pond being members of the ancient sect
of "Coenobites". At least one scholarly edition of Walden
points out in a footnote that a Coenobite is "a member of a
religious community," and ignores the pun about the fishermen
"See-no-bites.") But such pure puns if I may call them "pure"
are
comparatively rare. Most of Thoreau's humor, as I have said is
directed at the foibles of contemporary society and is not only
directed at them, but hits with a wallop.
Unfortunately humor is almost impossible to demonstrate
by excerpts. One of its essentials is that it be seen in context,
for it is often its very context that makes it humorous. But let me
try a few samples:
The head monkey at Paris puts on
a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
One farmer says to me, "You
cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes
nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which,
with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along
in spite of every obstacle.
I observed that the vitals of
the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the post-office, and
the bank; and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a
bell, a big gun, and a fire engine, at convenient places; and
the houses were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in
lanes and fronting one another, so that every traveller had to
run the gauntlet, and every man, woman and child might get a
lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the
head of the line, where they could most see and be seen, and
have the first blow at him, paid the highest prices for their
places; and the few straggling inhabitants in the outskirts,
where the long gaps in the line began to occur, and the
traveller could get over walls or turn aside into cow-paths, and
so escape, paid a very slight ground or window tax.
If I should only give a few
pulls at the parish bell-rope as for a fire, that is, without
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the
outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements
which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor
a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow
that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if
we confess the truth, much more to see it burn.
We are eager to tunnel under the
Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New;
but perchance the first news that will leak through into the
broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide
has the whooping cough.
If excerpting humor is dangerous,
analyzing humor is even more so. Humor should stand on its own two
legs or it will fall flat on its face. But I wish to point out
once again that Thoreau's humor is not used for its own sake. It is
satirical humor and aimed at the reform of existing institutions and
customs that Thoreau feels needs reform. And although we laugh at
it or with it down deep underneath we realize there is often more
validity to Thoreau's suggested reforms than to the customs of the
society in which we live.
A fourth approach to Walden is the belletristic.
From the purely technical standpoint, Walden is good writing
and is worth examining as such. It has been frequently and quite
rightfully said that Thoreau wrote the first modern American
prose. One has only to compare a passage of Walden from
almost any one of its contemporaries to see the difference. It was
the vogue at the time to be abstract, circumlocutory, periphrastic,
euphemistic, and euphuistic. Walden in contrast is clear,
concrete, precise, and to the point. Emerson made the point a
century ago when he said:
In reading Henry Thoreau's
journal [and the same can be said of Walden], I am very
sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength
which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed the
wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field-laborer
accosts a piece of work, which I should shun as a waste of
strength, Henry shows in his literary task. He has the muscle,
and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline.
In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is
in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent
images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality.
'Tis as if I went into the gymnasium, and saw youths leap,
climb, and swing with a force unapproachable, though their
feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.
Walden, like Thoreau's cabin,
is tightly constructed, Each sentence, each paragraph, and each
chapter is in its carefully chosen niche. The basic unifying
device of the book is the year. Although Thoreau spent two years,
two months, and two days at Walden Pond, in writing the book, he
compressed his adventures into the cycle of one year. Walden
opens with the cutting down of the pine trees in March and the
construction of the cabin in the spring. In summer he moves into
the cabin and tends his beanfield. In the autumn he builds his
fireplace and warms his house. In the winter he observes his
neighbors, human, animal and inanimate. Then with the breaking up
of the ice on the pond and the renascence of spring he brings the
book to a close. One of the most interesting facets of Lyndon
Shanley's The Making of Walden is his revelation of how
carefully Thoreau reworked and transposed his sentences to better
carry out this theme of the cycle of the year.
Each individual chapter of the book has its place in the
book as a whole. There is a careful alteration of the spiritual and
the mundane ("Higher Laws" is followed by "Brute Neighbors"), the
practical and philosophical ("Economy" is followed by "Where I Lived
and What I Lived For"), the human and the animal ("Winter Visitors"
is followed by "Winter Animals"). Adjacent chapters are tied
together by contrast (as "Solitude" and "Visitors"), by chronology
(as "The Pond in Winter" and "Spring"), or by carefully worded
connective phrases (as after "Reading" he begins "Sounds" with:
"But while we are confined to books..." "Or after "The Bean-Field"
he begins "The Village" with: "After hoeing..."). And the three
major expository chapters ("Economy," "Higher Laws," and
"Conclusion") are placed strategically at the beginning, middle, and
end of the book.
Within the individual chapters the details of
construction are just as carefully worked out. In "The Ponds" he
starts with Walden and then takes a southeastern sweep (his favorite
direction for hiking according to his essay on "Walking") across
Concord from Flint's Pond to Goose Pond to Fairhaven Bay, to White
Pond. In "Former Inhabitants: and Winter Visitors," he starts with
the residents of the days of the Revolution, works up through the
most recent resident of the area Hugh Quoil, who died the first
autumn Thoreau was at the pond and ends with those who visited him
throughout his stay at the pond. Similar patterns can be worked out
for each chapter.
Carefulness of
construction continues into the individual paragraph. Although the
average reader is not usually aware of it, Thoreau's paragraphs are
unusually long. Walden contains only 423 paragraphs, an
average of only slightly more than one per page in the typical
edition. But so carefully developed are they that one does not
ordinarily notice their length. Their structure is so varied that
there is little point in attempting to pick out typical examples.
However , one of his favorite devices is at least worth mentioning
his use of the climax ending. Notice how frequently the final
sentence in his paragraphs not only neatly sums up the paragraph as
a whole, but usually carries it one step beyond, with an added
thrust if the paragraph is satirical, with a broader concept if the
paragraph is philosophical. Just as with his chapters, many of
Thoreau's paragraphs are independent essays in themselves and can
stand alone. But they cannot be moved from their specific niche
within the book as a whole without damage to the structure.
Thoreau's sentences too are often unusually long. It
takes very little search to find one half a page in length and more
than one runs on for a full page or more. But again so carefully
constructed are they that the average reader has no difficulty with
their syntax and is hardly aware of their complexity. Let me take
just one serpentine example from "House-Warming":
I sometimes dream of a larger
and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring
materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall consist of
only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall,
without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins
supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, useful to
keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out
to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the
prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill;
a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole
to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in
the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of
the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the
spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when
you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over;
where the weary traveler may wash, and eat, and converse, and
sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be
glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the
essentials of a house, and nothing for housekeeping; where you
can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and
everything hangs upon its peg that man should use; at once
kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where
you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a ladder, so
convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay
your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven
that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils
are the chief ornament where the washing is not put out. nor the
fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested
to move from off the trapdoor, when the cook would descend into
the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or
hollow beneath without stamping.
Three hundred and fifty-one words,
thirty nine comas, eight semicolons and one dash and yet I doubt if
any attentive student has any difficulty with its meaning. I do not,
however, want to give the impression that all of Thoreau's sentences
are grammatical leviathans. There are sentences in Walden
only two words in length. One extreme is as frequent as the other
and the majority are of more moderate length. Thoreau understood
fully the necessity of variety in sentence structure and strength.
The point is that he could handle the sentence well no matter what
its length.
Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of Thoreau's word choice
is the size of his vocabulary. Walden is
guaranteed to send the conscientious student to the dictionary. In a
random sampling we find such words as integument, umbrageous,
deliquium, aliment, fluviatile, and periplus. Yet Thoreau
cannot be termed ostentatious in his word-usage. He simply searches
for and uses the best possible word for each situation.
A second characteristic is his allusiveness. On a
typical page may echo a Biblical phrase, quote from a metaphysical
poet, translate a few words from an ancient classic, make an
allusion to a Greek god, cite an authority on early American
history, or toss in a metaphor from a Hindu "Bible." It is true
that he is usually careful to make his allusions in such a way that
knowledge of the work alluded to is not essential to an
understanding of Thoreau's meaning. But the serious reader has his
curiosity aroused and wants his questions answered. To satisfy my
own curiosity I once took a list of more than fifty different types
of speech allusions, metaphors, rhetorical questions, alliteration,
analogy, puns, epanorthosis, parables, similes, meiosis,
anti-strophe, oxymoron, epizeuxis, anaphora, litotes, anti-thesis,
portmanteau words, metonomy, contrast, personification, epistrophe,
synecdoche, irony, apostrophe, hyperbole, and so on and with no
difficulty at all found excellent examples of each one in Walden.
There is hardly a trick of the trade that Thoreau does not make use
of. I think it significant that a recent edition of Walden
is aimed for use as a textbook in college classes in rhetoric and
grammar.
A fifth level on which to read
Walden is
spiritual level. And I would not be exaggerating in the least to
say that Walden has become veritably a Bible a guidebook to
the higher life for many, many people. In his chapter on "Reading",
Thoreau says, "How many a man ha dated a new era in his life from
the reading of a book!" And Walden has been just such a book
for many people. I spoke earlier of the fact that many of Thoreau's
contemporaries went out of their way to skip over such chapters as
"Economy", "Where I Lived and What I lived For", "Higher Laws" and
"Conclusion". Ironically it is just those chapters which are most
essential to Walden as a spiritual guidebook. And it is
interesting to note that our contemporary anthologies of American
literature are tending to print excerpts from those chapters rather
than from the natural history chapters that I spoke of earlier.
It is a major thesis of
Walden that the time has
come for a spiritual rebirth a renewal and rededication of our
lives to higher things. It is true that we have progressed a long
way from the status of the caveman. But our progress has been for
the most part material rather than spiritual. We have improved our
means, but not our ends. We can unquestionable travel faster than
our ancestors, but we continue to waste our time in trivial pursuits
when we get there. We have cut down the number hours of labor
required to keep ourselves alive, but we have not learned what to do
with the time thus saved. We devote the major part of our national
energy to devising new ways of blowing up the rest of the world and
ignore attempts to make better men of ourselves.
Thoreau could hardly be called orthodox from a religious
standpoint (or as a matter of fact, from any standpoint at all), but
it is significant to note that one of his favorite texts was "What
shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loose his own
soul?" And Walden on its highest level is a guide to the
saving of your own soul, to a spiritual rebirth.
As many critics have pointed out, the most frequently
recurring symbol in Walden from the beginning of the book to
the very end is the symbol of rebirth and renewal. The book as a
whole, as I have said, is based on the cycle of seasons ending with
the renewal of the earth and its life coming in the spring. The
chapter on "Sounds" follows the same pattern for the day, beginning
with the sounds of morning, continuing on through the afternoon, the
evening, and the night, and ending with the renewal of the world
from its sleep with the crowing of the cock in the morning. Thoreau
speaks of the purification of the Indians and of the Mexicans. He
tells us of a strange and wonderful insect that was reborn out of
the apple-tree after sixty years of dormancy. The very closing
words of the book are a promise of a newer and better life that can
be achieved if we but strive for it:
I do not say that John or
Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of
that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make it to dawn.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that
day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star.
How can we approach, how can we
achieve such a life? We will find one answer in "Higher Laws":
If one listens to the faintest
but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly
true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may
lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and
faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which
one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments
and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his genius till it
misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps
no one can say that the consequences are to be regretted, for
these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day
or night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a
fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic,
more starry, more immortal, that is your success. All nature is
your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless
yourself.
And the second is from his
"Conclusion":
I learned
this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to
live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind,
will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more
liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and
within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his
favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license
of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his
life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness
weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need
not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them.
Thoreau is sometimes dismissed as a
misanthrope or a skulker, one who devoted himself to carping and
criticism. But note that when Walden if approached on this
spiritual level, it is not negative, it is positive. Thoreau is not
so much complaining about the way things are but rather showing the
way things should be. He is firmly convinced that the sun is
but a morning star.
I have approached
Walden from five different
angles. But I have by no means exhausted the number of such
approaches. Walden can and does mean all things to all men.
Therein lies its very strength. It has been tested by time and not
found wanting. In its first hundred years it has grown, not
diminished in stature. I have no fear as to its being lost sight of
in one more century or two or three or four. It will endure.
A
Note on the Text:
-
Source: Originally published in The Massachusetts Review
(Autumn 1962). Reproduced from Harding's edited photocopy (ca.
1986)
in The Walter Harding Collection in the
Thoreau Society Collections
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