Last February, I picked up Walden on a Saturday morning and hoped to get through the first chapter. But by evening, I had not started any work, had not eaten and had torn halfway through the book. On my walk back from the library, I felt that I was holding something sacred in my bag.
I’m not sure how philosophy usually impacts the reader, but to say that Thoreau’s words had altered my normal ability to function would be a drastic understatement. It’s been eight months since then and not a day goes by without a passage from Walden occupying my mind.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau came out of an atypical experiment. Thoreau spent two years in a small cabin on Walden Pond. This was not an exhibition of isolated survival and he was by no means entirely detached from society. Rather, it was an attempt to “live deliberately.”
He writes, “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written,” so that is what I try to do each time I read his work. Walden is equal parts social critique, environmental observation and a radical philosophy for the modern day. It is full of Shakespearean-level insults (“Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth” and “Some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough”) and convoluted, smirk-inducing humor (“I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced”).
Walden was published in 1854, as the American identity struggled to fit inside the continent. That same year the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed and tensions over a slave-based economy were growing. While much of the American public looked to the politicians and statesmen for solutions, Thoreau looked inward. On choosing how to live, he writes “I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead.”
From the perspective of someone in a capitalist culture, Walden can seem like an unrealistic fantasy. Thoreau unabashedly argues against eating meat, buying new clothes and all other consumptions that cause people to spend their lifetime focused on distractions rather than exploring themselves and their place in the universe. On and on, his criticisms of society began to mount in merit, and after a while, it became difficult for me to read anymore. He held up an honest reflection of my life which was incredibly uncomfortable and disturbing to look at. It’s a difficult thing to sit with that tension. You must acknowledge the cataclysmic gap between who you are, and your perception of yourself. And then comes the inescapable question: what will I do about it? There is the option to pretend, to just go about life normally. But there is also the much more difficult option of deeply considering it, trying to improve, failing and repeating that process indefinitely.
For reasons I have long since mused over but still do not know, Thoreau’s words which reoccur most frequently in my mind are these: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” How casually he leaves this experiment that gave way to utter genius. I find the idea of “several more lives to live” quite beautiful, especially now, during a time when one single career pursued to optimization is seen as common sense. Unlike some other philosophers, Thoreau made a valiant attempt to live out the ideas he put forth. He could’ve been a “successful” person in society; yet, he turned down the common paths to pursue the “bent of [his] genius.”
Quite fittingly, Thoreau writes, “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.” And so he did. His success was not in his day but in the centuries after. And isn’t that how it often goes, at least for true success? Socrates was a filthy, disruptive, executed criminal in his day; but he played the long game. To take such actions, one must not only be confident, but foolish — advancing in the direction of your dreams is impractical, unstable, and against the better judgment of most people — but how grateful I am that not everyone is most people. We are wholly poor assessors of the success of those who live among us.
With each read, I come back to the same question: what do I do with this wisdom? It seems you can only consider something for a certain amount of time, or else you will default to inaction. On this sentiment, he says, “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.” Which I interpret this to mean it is okay, if not essential, for all your ideas to exist in that ethereal, intangible place where our minds live. But the next step one must take is to bring those ideas into practice. He’s not prescribing a two-year-long retreat in the woods to everyone. Instead, he is screaming from the rooftops that every individual has the possibility of living by higher laws, pushing their consciousness to undiscovered regions and thus making something meaningful out of the brief breaths we take.
That’s the rub. What he does most is remind me that I am alive. Moreover, we are not docile passengers until death, but curious creatures who can dare to live out daunting dreams.
Luke Dennis is a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He can be reached at ld524@cornell.edu.
