Henry David Thoreau: A Life

1651 Pages·2017·8.31 MB·English

by  Laura Dassow Walls

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A Life
LAURA DASSOW WALLS
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Land of the Grass-Ground River
Tahatawan’s Arrowhead
Enclosures and Commons
The Genesis of Musketaquid
The Coming of the English
Living the Revolution
Part I The Making of Thoreau
CHAPTER ONE Concord Sons and Daughters
Coming to Concord
The Early Years of John and Cynthia Thoreau
Making Concord Home
CHAPTER TWO Higher Learning from Concord to Harvard (1826–1837)
A Concord Education
A Harvard Portrait
Learning to Leave Harvard
CHAPTER THREE Transcendental Apprentice (1837–1841)
Sic Vita
Transcendental Self-Culture
Concord Social Culture
The Thoreau School
“There is no remedy for love but to love more”
Compensations
CHAPTER FOUR “Not till We Are Lost” (1842–1844)
The Death of John Thoreau
“Surely joy is the condition of life!”: New Friends, New Ventures
Thoreau on Staten Island
The Road to Walden
Part II The Making of Walden
CHAPTER FIVE “Walden, Is It You?” (1845–1847)
Preparations
On Walden Pond: The First Season
Going to Extremes I: Thoreau in Jail
Going to Extremes II: Thoreau on Katahdin
Leaving Walden
CHAPTER SIX A Writer’s Life (1847–1849)
“Will you be my father?”: Thoreau at the Emersons’
“Lectures multiply on my desk”: Thoreau Finds His Audience
“Civil Disobedience”
A Basket of Delicate Texture: Weaving Thoreau’s “Week”
CHAPTER SEVEN From Concord to Cosmos: Thoreau’s Turn to Science
(1849–1851)
“The law which reveals”: Cape Cod
“Even this may be the year”: 1850
“The captain of a huckleberry party”
CHAPTER EIGHT The Beauty of Nature, the Baseness of Men (1851–1854)
Abolition and Reform after the Fugitive Slave Law
The Hermit at Home
The Higher Law from Chesuncook to “Walden”
Reading “Walden”
Part III Successions
CHAPTER NINE Walden-on-Main (1854–1857)
“What Shall It Profit?”: Thoreau after “Walden”
Illness and Recovery
“The infinite extent of our relations”
CHAPTER TEN Wild Fruits (1857–1859)
The Last Excursions to Cape Cod and the Maine Woods
Life in the Commons: Village, Mountain, River
“A Transcendentalist above all”: Thoreau and John Brown
CHAPTER ELEVEN A Constant New Creation (1860–1862)
The Year of Darwin
“The West of which I speak”: Thoreau’s Last Journey
“The leaves teach us how to die”
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Gallery
Preface
What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers
who has yet lived a whole human life.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Everyone who comes to Thoreau has a story. Mine begins in a neighborhood
bookstore where I pulled a book off the shelf simply because it was small and
green—like the little green book I’d been carrying around (filched from my
father’s library) by a writer named Ralph Waldo Emerson. “There is one mind
common to all individual men,” it opened. “Of the works of this mind history is
the record.” To a restless, idealistic teenager, this was catnip. And here was a
second green book! This one had a double title, Walden and Civil Disobedience:
“I have lived some thirty years on this planet,” I read, “and I have yet to hear the
first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” That made
sense. Don’t trust anybody over thirty, we were all saying, for the adult world
was clearly mad. Every afternoon I brought the newspaper in off the front porch
and read the headlines: how many soldiers had died in Vietnam, where the latest
riots were burning, which of my heroes had just been assassinated. “Here is life,”
continued the new green voice, “an experiment to a great extent untried by me;
but it does not avail me that they have tried it.”1 More catnip! I bought the book
and brought it to school. Next time I was marched to the mandatory football
rally, I split off at the door, sat on a grassy rise nearby, and opened my copy of
Walden, holding it high so my teachers could see the title. They left me alone,
and I’ve been stepping to the music of that different drummer ever since.
I began this biography to return to the figure who opened up that space for
independent thinking, to learn how he had opened up that space for himself. “A
man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the
world,” wrote Emerson.2 Thoreau’s roots were in Concord, Massachusetts,
where he was born in 1817—far from the Seattle of 1970. Yet had Thoreau lived
a normal life span, my grandmother could have shaken his hand; our world is
that close, in many ways the flower and fruitage of his. Two hundred years ago,
American democracy still felt raw, experimental, and uncertain, especially in
Concord, where America was a family affair, earned by one generation and
about to pass to the next. Thoreau felt the weight of that responsibility more than
most, and when he returned home from college, he set about reexamining the
roots of democracy for himself. For it was clear to him that the American
Revolution was incomplete: inequality was rife, materialism was rampant, and
the American economy was wholly dependent on slavery. Yet in a terrible irony,
his elders seemed content to let this state of things, from which they all
benefited, continue. No, they were not to be trusted; he must try the experiment
for himself.
By the time Thoreau built his house on Walden Pond at the edge of town, he
had come of age among a circle of radical intellectuals called
“Transcendentalists,” for their belief in higher ideas that “transcended” daily life.
Emerson was their leader; he had moved to Concord while Thoreau was at
Harvard, class of ’37. Back home, Thoreau found his new neighbor declaring
America’s intellectual independence, even as his own household had become a
hotbed of antislavery activism. Thoreau joined the new revolution, but by 1844
he was less certain that Emerson, now his mentor, had all the answers. The
dilemma that pressed upon him was how to live the American Revolution not as
dead history but as a living experience that could overturn, and keep overturning,
hidebound convention and comfortable habits. Moving to Walden Pond thus had
a double purpose: it offered a writer’s retreat, where Thoreau could follow his
calling as spiritual seeker, philosopher, and poet; and it offered a public stage on
which he could dramatize his one-person revolution in consciousness, making
his protest a form of performance art.
In writing Walden, Thoreau encouraged his readers to try the experiment of
life for themselves, rather than inheriting its terms from others—including
himself. When he returned from Walden and became, once again, a working
member of a large family in town, he tried to bring into the heart of workaday
America his belief in life as a quest toward higher truth. Thoreau is often said to
have turned to “Nature,” but what he actually turned to was, more exactly, the
“commons”—spaces that, back then, were still open to everyone: woods, fields
and hilltops, ponds and blueberry thickets, rivers, meadows, trails up nearby
mountains, the long open beaches on the Atlantic shore. Nearly all his writings
use landforms and watersheds to explore the commons, expanding our shared
natural and intellectual heritage until it touches the Cosmos itself. When Thoreau
sailed on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, he traveled the deep stream of
time; when he walked the shore of Cape Cod, he dabbled his toes in a wild ocean
stretching around the globe; when he stood on the shoulder of Mount Katahdin,
he breathed the thin chill air of a planet in stellar space.
This viewpoint—deep time, planetary space—structured Thoreau’s thinking
from his Harvard years onward. He read at least six languages; to him, literature
was world literature, beginning with the written word itself—Homer, Virgil, the
Bible, the ancient scriptures of India and China, Old English poetry—on through
the latest in German philosophy and science, French histories of the New World,
England’s most advanced Romantic poetry, and Scotland’s most vigorous prose.
Thoreau filled dozens of notebooks with extracts from hundreds of volumes,
creating his own working library: poetry, history, science, anthropology, travel,
and exploration. His ferocious curiosity meant the least detail in his own
backyard could speak to him of faraway times and places: farmers working their
fields evoked Virgil’s Georgics; Arctic explorers helped him analyze winter in
New England; Irish laborers showed him the Bhagavad Gita in the waters of
Walden. Through the 1840s and ’50s, Thoreau’s commitment to social activism
deepened as he linked the actions of his Northern neighbors to the perpetuation
of slavery in the South, a connection that led to his famous acts of protest: his
night in jail for nonpayment of taxes, his essay “Civil Disobedience,” his furious
denunciation of “Slavery in Massachusetts,” his passionate support for John
Brown’s attempted insurrection. When death stilled his voice just after the onset
of the Civil War, Thoreau’s friends mourned not only him, but also the loss of
all the work he had begun and never lived to complete.
· · ·
When I began writing this book, the term Anthropocene was a novelty:
human beings, scientists were suggesting, had become a geological force
changing the planet itself. As I worked, I realized that Thoreau’s life span,
though short, had been long enough to witness and record the arrival of the
Anthropocene epoch in America. He was born on a colonial-era farm into a
subsistence economy based on agriculture, on land that had sustained a stable
Anglo-American community for two centuries and, before that, Native American
communities for eleven thousand years. People had been shaping Thoreau’s
landscape since the melting of the glaciers. By the time he died, in 1862, the
Industrial Revolution had reshaped his world: the railroad transformed Concord
from a local economy of small farms and artisanal industries to a suburban node
on a global network of industrial farms and factories. His beloved woods had
been cleared away, and the rural rivers he sailed in his youth powered cotton
mills. In 1843, the railroad cut right across a corner of Walden Pond, but in 1845
Thoreau built his house there anyway, to confront the railroad as part of his
reality. By the time he left Walden, at least twenty passenger and freight trains
screeched past his house daily. His response was to call on his neighbors to
“simplify, simplify.” Instead of joining the rush to earn more money for the
latest gadgets and goods from China, Europe, or the West Indies—feeding an
economy that grew mindlessly, he wrote, like rank and noxious weeds—he
called for mindful cultivation of one’s inner being and one’s greater community,
a spiritual rather than material growth through education, art, music, and
philosophy. When he wrote that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of
things which he can afford to let alone,” he meant not an ascetic’s renunciation,
but a redefinition of true wealth as inner rather than outer, aspiring to turn life
itself, even the simplest acts of life, into a form of art. “There is Thoreau,” said
one of his closest friends. “Give him sunshine, and a handful of nuts, and he has
enough.”3
Thoreau’s own family rose from penury to middle-class respectability after
his father founded a small pencil factory. Thoreau was fond of machinery, and
his inventions and improvements to the manufacturing process brought
prosperity to his family. To pay his own expenses—including the bills for living
in the family’s boardinghouse—he worked as a day laborer and eventually built
up his own business as a land surveyor. When he wasn’t laying out property
bounds, he was crossing those bounds in his own private enterprise as a walker
and writer, earning just enough from publishing and lecturing to cover travel
expenses. The more closely Thoreau lived and worked in nature, the more he
was drawn to science, for the workings of things always fascinated his
engineer’s mind; his quest to understand nature’s “bundle of relations” made
him a pioneer of ecological science well before the field existed. Yet the more
deeply he understood natural science, the more intensely he longed for
something beyond understanding—what he called “the wild.” In “Walking,” one
of his most famous essays, Thoreau declared his credo: “In Wildness is the
preservation of the world.” In later years, he kept a detailed journal to record his
observations of nature (including human nature), noting the date each flower
bloomed, the date the ice melted on Walden Pond, when leaves turned color, and
the dates and depths of snowfalls. He bragged that from looking at the flowers,
he could tell the day of the month within two days. Scientists are now using his
meticulous records to track with precision the ever-earlier onset of spring and the
lingering of fall, as year by year climate change shrinks winters and alters the
composition of Walden’s plant communities.4
But today, as those scientists have shown, Thoreau’s flower calendar is
deranged, for the synchronies he documented are falling out of rhythm. His
records thus help us measure the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch that
threatens to overturn everything he believed. Thoreau could look to “Nature” as
an eternal fountain of renewal and regeneration, a sacred force capable of
healing even the deepest acts of human destruction, including slavery, war, and
environmental devastation. He ended Walden with an ecstatic vision into the
regenerative forces of the Cosmos, and late in life, when he took up Darwin’s
Origin of Species, he saw in a flash that the theory of evolution meant nature was
a “constant new creation,” a creative principle unceasingly at work, all around,
every day. That the actions of human beings and the ancient fossil fuels they dug
out of the ground to feed the engines of industry could fundamentally alter those
natural processes—changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and of the
encircling oceans, melting the poles, killing winter, killing life itself—was
beyond Thoreau’s reckoning. Can his faith live on after nature, at least nature as
he knew it, has ended?
I think it can and will. Thoreau could speculate that even a slight shift in
natural processes—a little colder winter, a little higher flood—might put an end
to humanity, so dependent are we on a wild nature that gives us no guarantees.
Hence he emphasized living “deliberately”; that is, living so as to perceive and
weigh the moral consequence of our choices. “Civil Disobedience” insists that
the choices we make create our environment, both political and natural—all the
choices, even the least and most seemingly trivial. The sum of those choices is
weighed on the scales of the planet itself, a planet that is, like Walden Pond,
sensitive and alive, quick to measure the least change and register it in sound and
form. To Thoreau this was cause for tremendous optimism: as the village
expanded and the old trees fell, he planted new ones and reveled in the young
forest. If the English settlers had wiped out many of New England’s animals—
beaver, wolf, bear and cougar, moose and deer, wild turkey—still there was
much remaining, enough to assure him the wild was everywhere, ready to reseed
and reclaim what it had lost. His last, unfinished works, Wild Fruits and The
Dispersion of Seeds, emphasize how the smallest of seeds, let loose on the winds
or carried by the least of beings, could transform the world. All humans need to
do is learn to work with instead of against the vital currents of life. The books
Thoreau didn’t live to finish are about building a community of life, and he died
in the faith that his words, like seeds, would take root and grow. Exactly insofar
as we, today, share his belief in the future of life and act on it, will he continue to
speak to us.
· · ·
Henry Seidel Canby, in his 1939 biography of Thoreau, listed half a dozen
biographies he might have written instead: Thoreau as creative artist, mystical
Pan of Concord, rustic local boy who made good, Transcendentalist in conflict
with modern science, individualist in conflict with society.5 As Canby
recognized, Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too
quixotic, mischievous, many-sided, paradoxical. Even the friends who knew him
best despaired of getting any truthful portrait on paper. Yet each generation has