Thoreau's Wisdom

w at k i n s M a s t e r s o f w i s d o M

THOREAUTranscendent Nature for a Modern World

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Contents

Biography vii

Introduction xvii

P A R T I

T H O R E A U A N D T H E

T R A N S C E N D E N T A L I S T M O V E M E N T

Vanity of Human Life 3

Love of Nature 11

Wisdom 25

Books 31

Walking 41

The American Mind 53

Paradise 63


P A R T I I

W A L D E N

Life at Concord 79

Economy 93

What I Lived For 105

Sounds 123

Solitude 137

The Ponds 149

My Conclusions 161

Virtues 167

Mankind 177

The Earth 187

Epilogue 197

Bibliography 205

Acknowledgement 210


Introduction

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was undoubt-edly one of the brightest and most brilliant stars in that grand sparkling galaxy of literary talent, along

with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the celebrated poet, Walt Whitman, who later became the inspirational leaders of what is now known as the American Transcendentalist Movement.

Transcendentalism sprang from the philosophy of the Irish bishop and philosopher, George Berkley, and the great German sage of Magdeburg, Immanuel Kant, and his many followers, such as the eminent thinkers Arthur Schopenhauer and George Wilhelm Hegel. This was a movement that is broadly named Transcendental Idealism, and was in sharp contrast to the empirical materialist philosophies that were widely current in their day. These idealists wished to ground their worldview on transcendental principles, not based on observations falsified by deceptive sensory experience, but deriving from the inner, spiritual essence of the human being. At the same time, the great Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, had entered Europe in translation, and were soon recognized as being in harmony with the newly emerging Western transcendental idealis-tic philosophy, which they influenced. In addition to these


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scriptural sources, the American Transcendentalists also read the works of the principal figures of the English Romantic Movement, such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had also made a study of these seminal ideas.

The member of the Transcendentalist Movement who most influenced Thoreau was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his mentor, guide and friend. Emerson was 14 years older than Thoreau, and was close to Henry for about 5 or 6 years after he graduated from Harvard in the spring of 1837. They enjoyed a lengthy and profound cor-respondence together. Contemporaries of Thoreau jokingly claimed that he went through a phase when he even walked, talked and combed his hair like Emerson. Quickly recogniz-ing Thoreau’s genius, Emerson enjoyed his blunt honesty and vivid sense of humour. Emerson’s early influence on Thoreau is clearly demonstrated in the younger man’s view of, and affinity for, the natural world. In many ways, Thoreau surpassed his mentor in living the exemplary ‘natural’ life, as his marvellous book Walden demonstrates. Emerson, despite his philosophy, was woefully inept when it came to manual labour and tending animals.

Walden, Thoreau’s most famous work, is now one of the most precious jewels in the golden crown of American literature. The book is partly a personal declaration of independence, but also includes themes on social experi-mentation, far-sighted ecological preservation and spiritual quest, as well as serving as a practical guide for self-suffi-ciency. This great book has inspired many a brave soul who has wanted to live separately in nature, away from the distaste-ful corruption inherent in metropolitan society. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau’s experiences over the course of


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two years, two months and two days in the cabin he himself built near Walden Pond, amidst beautiful green woodlands that were owned by Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau never intended to live as a hermit, for he received visitors regularly, and returned their visits. Rather, he hoped to isolate himself from urban society in order to gain a much more objective understanding of the modern world. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau’s main goals, inspired by his Transcendentalist philosophy, which rapidly became a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made abundantly clear in his book, the Walden Pond cabin was actually only two miles from home, and not totally isolated in backwoods.

Henry was also a highly accomplished and gifted poet in his own right. Apart from composing major and minor poems throughout his life, he often punctuated his journal, essays and books with original poetry. Emerson said he was ‘the purest strain and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest’. Thoreau himself said: ‘Poetry is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man’s life.’ His poem ‘I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied’ is psychologically most profound and has been widely anthologized ever since it first appeared. He was a frequent contributor to the literary journal The Dial edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller. He himself wrote: ‘One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these Poems, he would decide by his own feelings genuinely. In this Anthology I have inserted a major Poem between each prose extract.’

Thoreau maintained that the function of the poet was to reveal the truth about nature, and many of his best poems


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are contemplations on the natural world. He seems to have been especially moved by foggy and misty landscapes, as evidenced in ‘Haze’ and ‘Fog’. These poems also have an element of mysticism as they take the form of supplication to objects whose meaning the poet seeks to understand. One of Thoreau’s most famous poems is probably the ten-line meditation ‘Smoke’, which appears in the ‘House-Warming’ chapter of Walden. In it, Thoreau reflects on the smoke rising at dawn above the hamlet and likens it to the defiant Icarus of classical mythology. The poet is like the flame, and the smoke is the poem that is sent upward to God. However, the poem does not clarify the truth of God’s sun as the poet had hoped, but serves only to blot it out. Other poems reveal Thoreau’s attitude toward poetry with the subject of inspi-ration. In ‘Inspiration’ the poet laments that the sensitivity he feels toward the world when he is inspired cannot be translated untainted into action. In ‘The Poet’s Delay’ and ‘I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied’ (also called ‘Sic Vita’) Thoreau expresses his sense of the artist’s – and indeed his own – limitations in a world of infinite wonder. Other themes that appear in Thoreau’s poems include human relation-ships (‘Sympathy’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Love’), mystical experience (‘Bluebird’), freedom (‘Independence’) and the transitory nature of life (‘Autumn’).

His literary journals, which he commenced at Emerson’s suggestion, are considered masterpieces of this genre, and are still used as inspiration for all nature journal-keepers. He kept them updated for 24 years and they contain 2 million words. Henry David Thoreau’s method of keeping a journal evolved over many years; it was essential to his nature study and is considered to contain the best of his writing. His journal


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was started on 22 October 1837, just a few days after his graduation from Harvard. He wrote in it nearly every day until 3 November 1861, seven months before his death on 6 May 1862. Henry David Thoreau stopped writing spe-cifically for publication around 1852, and focused on his journal, which grew to 14 volumes. His great essays, such as ‘Walking’, ‘Autumnal Tints’ and ‘Wild Apples’, were drawn from these journals. In speaking about a poet, he said: ‘ Is there any other work for him but a good journal?’

Henry was outstanding as an essayist. He pursued this art to its highest degree with a number of important topics. He was a zealous social critic, and in his famous ‘Essay on Civil Disobedience’ he anticipates the struggle of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in showing how, through disciplined civil disobedience, resistance to tyrannical government can be successful. The text also influenced Leo Tolstoy and John F Kennedy. Henry eloquently argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid such acquiescence that enables the government to make them the agents of injustice. He was motivated by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War.

One of the most famous quotations that best gives the flavour of this prominent essay is as follows:

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth – certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the


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remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Henry was strongly opposed to slavery, which he considered an abomination against human dignity. He expressed his views forcibly in his essay entitled ‘Slavery In Massachusetts’. It is based on a speech that he made at an anti-slavery rally in 1854 after the re-enslavement in Boston of a fugitive slave. During his forceful speech, he said:

Again it happens that the Boston Court-House is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE. Does any one think that justice or God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision? For him to sit there deciding still, when this question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the unlettered slave himself and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous. We may be tempted to ask from whom he received his commission, and who he is that received it; what novel statutes he obeys, and what precedents are to him of authority. Such an arbiter’s very existence is impertinence. We do not ask him to make up his mind, but to make up his pack.


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Another important, much-quoted essay is the famous ‘Life Without Principle’, in which Henry condemns the American social system and the problems of employment. In this work, Thoreau is at his most brilliant, conveying much of the spirit of Transcendentalism, which flavours this essay in a remarkable way. Here, as in this quotation, he makes his message abundantly clear, calling on mankind to greater honesty and sincerity:

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

Many of his esteemed essays were masterful descriptions of the nature he loved. These essays were all published as a book in 1863 under the title Excursions. They include, amongst others, ‘A Walk to Wachusett’, ‘A Winter Walk’,


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‘The Succession of Forest Trees’, ‘Walking’, ‘Autumnal Tints’, ‘Wild Apples’ and ‘Night and Moonlight’.

Here is a beautiful passage from ‘Walking’ that illustrates the genius and power of his nature writing. All his nature essays contain similar graphic descriptions annotated with wise comments.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog – a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go further than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there – the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea and rhodora – all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I would like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks – to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fuls of soil only, to cover the sand which was thrown


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out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house – my parlor – behind this plot instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities – that poor apology for a Nature and art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

There were many more semi-political and philosophical essays to follow. Perhaps the most favoured by critical and public opinion was ‘Paradise (To Be) Regained’. Here is a worthy extract to illustrate his enthusiasm for all that he firmly believed and held high:

No doubt the simple powers of nature, properly directed by man, would make it healthy and a paradise; as the laws of man’s own constitution but wait to be obeyed, to restore him to health and happiness. Our panaceas cure but few ails, our general hospitals are private and exclusive. We must set up another Hygeian than is now worshipped. Do not the quacks even direct small doses for children, larger for adults, and larger


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still for oxen and horses? Let us remember that we are to prescribe for the globe itself.

Finally, in attempting an overview of the unique genius of this great American and polymath, together with his lasting contribution to civilization, we are struck by the very wide range of his interests, and the many noble causes in which he firmly believed and fought to defend. Firstly, and perhaps most significantly, he was a fine, famous and notable author, regarded as an important and influential writer throughout the educated circles of the civilized world, not only in his own lifetime, but for subsequent generations as well. He was a gifted and voluminous poet, expressing naturalist and met-aphysical themes with great fluency and metrical effect. He was a classical poet versed in the highest standards of English prosody, but allowing everyday American folksiness to creep in and allow his verse to be accessible to the common man. He was deeply humanitarian, and a staunch abolitionist who hated the cruelty that the southern states of America had imposed on its enslaved population. He fought vehemently with pen and oratorical power to bring this hated practice to an end. He also respected and stood up for the rights of the Native American Indian, whose civilization and way of life he perceived to be deeply spiritual and not savage, as it was often portrayed.

As an orator he was powerful and dynamic and could hold audiences spellbound in the palm of his hand. He was a fierce opponent of unjust taxes placed upon the people, and again used his powers of pen and speech to expose these unfair practices, wherever and whenever he came across them. He believed that the just man should oppose,


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by individual passive resistance, any civil government that behaved immorally towards its citizens. He influenced and inspired great men to follow him, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas and the three Kennedy brothers. Among artists and authors who have confessed to being influenced by him, we have Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey, George Bernard Shaw and Edward Carpenter. There are numerous biographies. Charles Ives, the notable American composer, wrote the ‘Concord Sonata’ for piano with a special part for the flute, Thoreau’s own instrument. Thoreau also influenced indi-vidualist anarchist circles in Spain, France and Portugal. He was an environmentalist who adored nature. He opposed the kind of philistine developments that were a blot on the beauty of the American landscape. He reached fame through his magnificent book Walden, which became a handbook, almost a bible, for young Americans striving for independ-ence and freedom in claustrophobic city environments. He set an example of simple, healthy, self-determined living in natural surroundings, which is still an inspiration to pioneers and adventurers today, and has been, ever since that great seminal book first appeared on the literary scene.

Henry David’s Thoreau’s fine books, articles, essays, journals, correspondence and poetry total over 20 volumes. The great number of bibliographical references that are current are well over 100. Perhaps his most valuable con-tribution for the modern world is his writings on natural history, where he far-sightedly anticipated the methodol-ogy and discoveries of ecology and environmentalism. His


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elegant literary style weaves very close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings and historical lore all together, while displaying his poetic sensibility, philosophic wisdom and typical Yankee love of practicality. Among his hobbies and recreational pursuits he was an early pioneer in the sports of hiking and rambling, canoeing, wilderness protection, gardening, vegetarianism and temperance. He championed survival against hostile elements, political change and natural decay, imploring people not to be wasteful of the Earth’s precious resources.

As a philosopher, he was, like his great mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the root of the great school of American Transcendentalism, a unique blend of religion, humanism, and experimental living, which heralded the trumpeted poetic outbursts of Walt Whitman, all of which, in a way, presaged the coming New Age Movement. Many admirers regard him as a ‘visible saint’.

Today, the Thoreau Society, established in 1941, continues with the dissemination of knowledge about this great man by collecting books, manuscripts and artefacts relating to him and his contemporaries.

Note that all the verses between the prose extracts that follow in the ensuing chapters are from his Collected Poems unless otherwise stated.


Wisdom

t


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E P I T A P H O N T H E W O R L D

Here lies the body of this world,Whose soul alas to hell is hurled.This golden youth long since was past, Its silver manhood went as fast, An iron age drew on at last; ‘Tis vain its character to tell,The several fates which it befell, What year it died, when ‘twill arise, We only know that here it lies.

S I M P L I C I T y

The savage lives simply through ignorance and idleness or laziness, but the philosopher lives simply through wisdom.

[Journal, 5 December 1856]

M E N S A y T H E y k N O W M A N y T H I N g S

Men say they know many things;But lo! They have taken wings, –The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows.


W I S D O M | 2 7

O N M E N O f g E N I U S

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 were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the 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 momen-tarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

[Walden]


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A N D N O W T H E C O R D I A L C L O U D S

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,

And gently swells the wind to say all’s well, The scattered drops are falling fast and thin, Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats; But see that globe come rolling down its stem, Now like a lonely planet there it floats, And now it sinks into my garment’s hem.

Drip drip the trees for all the country round, And richness rare distils from every bough, The wind alone it is makes every sound, Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself, Who could not with his beams e’er melt me so, My dripping locks, – they would become an elf, Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.


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S I M P L I C I T y I N L I V I N g

Loving wisdom, is that it is most important to cultivate the highest faculties and spend as little time as possible in planting, weaving, building, etc. It depends upon the height of your standard, and no doubt through manual labor as police men are educated up to a certain level. The simple style is bad for the savage because he does worse than to obtain the luxuries of life; it is good for the philosopher because he does better than to work for them. The question is whether you can bear freedom . At present the vast majority of men, whether black or white, require the discipline of labor which enslaves them for their good. If the Irishman did not shovel all day, he would get drunk and quarrel. But the philosopher does not require the same discipline; if he shovelled all day, we should receive no elevating suggestions from him. There are two kinds of simplicity, – one that is akin to foolishness, the other to wisdom.

[Journal, 1 September 1853]


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