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“…the red alder berry glows like the eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds…” [Walden, Baker Farm]

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HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)

CHARACTER

-------Henry David Thoreau is known to most of us through his books Walden and Cape Cod. Other than these, what we may mostly remember about him are vague impressions gained from books and conversation. We may have read, for instance, that he was sickly, a hermit, a business failure, a homosexual, a lover of nature, and a social critic and revolutionary.

-------He experienced periods of illness throughout his life and died at 45 of tuberculosis. For the most part, however he was a vigorous man. He was known as a hard working and skillful laborer. He walked in the woods and fields at least 3 hrs a day carrying his notepad and spyglass. Near the end of his life he held his own in a grueling journey through the Maine woods in the company of a Native American guide.

-------Henry liked solitude at times and made many remarks on the topic. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [Walden - Solitude]; “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. [Walden - Economy]

-------He grew up within and spent most of his life at the center of a loving and supportive family who often depended on him in crises. His father was a gentle, kindly man. When he died in 1859, Henry took over the family graphite business. His mother was more practical and outgoing. She was an active member of anti-slavery organizations and evidently could talk Henry to silence. Henry was very fond of his older brother, John. John’s death in 1842 at only 27 was a blow that affected him all his life. Henry’s intellectual older sister, Helen, was very protective of him until her death in 1849. His adoring younger sister Sophia and his mother cared for him in his last illness.

-------Henry was known to his friends as a gregarious man who could dance well and who sang all the popular songs. He left a large correspondence which testified to the depth of his friendships with Emerson, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Horace Greeley, Hawthorne and many others. He was friends with woodsmen, Irish laborers, African Americans, farmers, and children, and he was fond of dogs and cats.

-------Many of his fellow townspeople did think of him as a failure, especially considering his excellent education. His friend and mentor Emerson wrote: "Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Instead of being the head of engineers, he is captain of a Huckleberry party." Henry himself wrote: “Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. [Life without Principles]; and “Have the gods sent us into this world…to do chores, hold horses, and the like, and not given us any spending money?”

-------Thoreau described his life for the members of his Harvard class: "I am a Schoolmaster, a Private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poet. He did all of these and he did them well, but to President Sparks of Harvard he wrote, "I have chosen letters as my profession."

-------Thoreau may have been a latent homosexual, but he fell in love with and proposed marriage to the 18 year old Ellen Sewall. He wrote to her: “I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea, and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever.” On his death bed he told his sister Sophia, “I have always loved her [Ellen].”

-------Of his friend Channing, Henry wrote: “The one who came farthest to my lodge…was a poet. … nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love.” [Walden - Winter] Of Mary Moody Emerson, Ralph's aunt, he said she was "the wittiest and most vivacious woman I know." Near the end of his life he was much attracted to Kate Brady, a 20 year old fan of Walden. Clifton Fadiman said of him: "Thoreau can get more out of ten minutes with a chickadee than most men from a night with Cleopatra."

HISTORICAL MILIEU

------- The central historical fact during Henry’s life was the approach of the Civil War, but he also saw the Fourrierist experiments of Brook Farm and Fruitlands, a wave of religious revivalism, the coming of the railroad to Concord, and the Irish potato famine.

EDUCATION

------- With financial help from his brother and sister, Henry graduated from Harvard in 1837. What would it have been like to be Henry’s room mate? He did well in school although he was considered a little disrespectful of authority. He became proficient in five languages, including Latin and Greek. It was not the Harvard of today, of course. Emerson said that Harvard taught all of the branches of learning. "Yes," Henry is supposed to have answered, "all of the branches and none of the roots."

READING

-------Henry was a serial reader throughout his life, one book leading to another. He kept numerous reading notebooks. Emerson, Goethe, Hinduism, the Stoics, Virgil, Linnaeus, Melville, Darwin’s Typee, Beagle, and Origin, Cato, Gilpin, John Evelyn, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ruskin on art, the Jesuit Relations, and all the eighteenth and nineteenth century naturalists, are just a suggestion of the breadth of his reading. Goethe in particular attracted him during college. Goethe wrote in his Italian Journey: "I shall never rest until I know that all my ideas are derived not from hearsay or tradition but from my real living contact with the things themselves."

TRANSCENDENTALISM

-------Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement in New England grew up together. Thoreau was nineteen when Emerson published “Nature,” an essay that explains the philosophical basis of the movement. Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement, opposed to the rationalist, conservative institution that Unitarianism had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were Unitarian ministers, Emerson among them. They found Unitarianism wanting both spiritually and emotionally, and, beginning in the late 1820s, expressed the need for a more personal and intuitive experience of the divine, one available to every person. Emerson wrote in “Nature,” "Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us?"

-------A belief in the reliability of the human conscience was a fundamental Transcendentalist principle, and this belief was based upon a conviction of the indwelling of God in the soul of the individual. Thoreau writes, in "Civil Disobedience," "the only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think is right." He believed the divine force was also revealed in nature.

-------Transcendentalism can be seen as the religious and intellectual expression of American democracy: all men had an equal chance of experiencing and expressing divinity directly, regardless of wealth, social status, or politics.

-------Margaret M. Brulatour writes, "Wildness: it is the philosophy ... that enabled Thoreau to outgrow, as Howarth says, 'the airy insubstantiality of [Transcendentalist] aesthetics. He put a solid ground of reality under Emerson's ideals, showed how his metaphysics actually work in the physical world'. Thoreau truly believed Emerson's theory: 'Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.' He devoted his lifetime to close scrutiny of the natural facts in order to perceive their spiritual message. He saw the American wilderness as the country's 'historic trust.’

THE STOICS

-------Another major contribution to Thoreau’s thinking came through his reading of the stoic philosophers, who believed the laws of nature rule men as well and that we should look to nature for our morals.

WRITING

-------Thoreau began his Journal in 1837, after graduation from Harvard. He records observations and impressions from his daily walks. This was separate from his reading notebooks. He also did some translations from Latin and German at this time. In his lifetime he published 40 essays but only two books, A Week…, and Walden.

SCHOOL

------- After a brief experience teaching in the Concord school, Thoreau began his own progressive school with his brother. They used no corporal punishment and went on many field trips. They never had many students, but the school was well thought of. Imagine Thoreau as your teacher! Henry gave it up when his brother became too sick to continue.

ELLEN SEWALL

------- Henry’s brother John proposed to Ellen in 1838. His suit was rejected by Ellen’s father who felt the Thoreaus were not financially stabile. Henry, who was even better liked by Ellen than his brother, proposed a year later and was rejected for the same reason.

TO EMERSON’S HOUSE

------- After his school closed, Henry went to live with the Emersons, where he was gardener, baby sitter, secretary, and factotum. At this time he gave a lecture on Sir Walter Raleigh which celebrated autonomous, courageous, self-reliant, freestanding individuals. Aalthough as Thoreau said: “Are we not all great men?”

FOURRIERISM, BROOK FARM, and the happily named FRUITLANDS

-------These communities became prominent in the early 1840’s. Emerson was briefly attracted but decided not to join. Thoreau was not tempted. “As for these communities, I think I had rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven. [Journal]

TO STATEN ISLAND

-------John Thoreau died in 1842. Henry was very much affected by his brother’s death. Emerson encouraged him to go to Long Island for a while, where he was a tutor to Emerson’s brother’s son. It was intended that Henry would also visit New York City and try to sell his writing. Thoreau didn’t care for New York. “I walked through New York yesterday and met no real and living person.” He did meet Horace Greeley, who was quite helpful to him, as well as Henry James Sr.

-------In 1843 “A WINTER WALK” was published in the DIAL, the transcendentalist magazine. It was his Henry’s first mature writing and his first excursion essay in which the reader was a walking companion. Several of the themes in this essay remained important throughout Thoreau’s life. “There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out;” and “What would human life be without forests?”

TO WALDEN

-------On July 4, 1845 Henry moved to his cottage at Walden Pond. He was there off and on until September 6, 1847. He had frequent visitors and made almost daily trips to town and to his parent’s house. He continued his long walks, he read, and he wrote. Much of Walden and most of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was written here. The river trip with his brother was taken in 1839. The book was self-published in 1849.

“CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE”

------- While Thoreau was living at Walden he was arrested for not paying his taxes in protest of the war with Mexico. He spent the night of July 23, 1846 in jail. Someone paid his taxes the next morning.

------- In the talk which Thoreau gave in connection with this experience, and which was subsequently published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government” [and later as “Civil Disobedience”], he made the following observations: “It is not a man’s duty…to devote himself to the eradication of…even the most enormous wrong….but it is his duty…not to give it ... his support.” “We should be men first and subjects afterward.” “Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one.”

------- Thoreau appears here to be refusing to participate in what he considers an immoral war, rather than actively opposing it himself or counseling forceful opposition.

A WEEK…

-------A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was published 1849. It was not a success. Thoreau wrote in a journal entry for October 28, 1853, "I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself--." It was a day by day account of nature and self discovery. The critics praised his descriptions of nature but accused him of pantheism.

THOREAU’S PANTHEISM

------- Thoreau’s pantheism, if that is the correct name for it, was both implied and admitted, but the term may not really define his thinking. He wrote, in various publications:

-------“A man of true religion finds his open temple in the whole universe, versus the jealous privacy of those who try to carry on a secret commerce with the gods, whose hiding place is some building.”

-------“God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. … Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature. … Let us settle ourselves and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition … till we come to a hard bottom… which we can call reality.”

-------“…since I was born to be a pantheist --- if that be the name of me, and I do the deeds of one. [letter to Horace Greeley]

1849/1850

-------Henry’s sister Helen dies of tuberculosis in 1849. Henry takes his first trip to Cape Cod in 1850, in company with Ellery Channing.

“THE WILD”

-------This was a talk, first given around 1850 and many times thereafter. It was published in 1862 as “WALKING.” This is an important work. Selected paragraphs from it end this essay.

WALDEN

-------Walden was Thoreau’s major work. He began it at Walden Pond, although it includes material he had written even before this. He completed seven drafts before its publication in 1854. It is a very rich work. You get out of it what you invest in the reading. There are roughly three themes:

1) The Economic fallacy

“…the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life with is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. [W Economy]

“I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. ….since ….the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably that the corporations may be enriched. [W Economy]

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” If this was true in the 1840’s…!!!

2) Simplify your life. Know yourself. Seize the day and live in it

“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 [W]

“Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. [Walden, p. 321]

“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.” (Walden, pp. 323- 324)

3) The rewards of life close to nature.

1854-1856

------- Henry is active in the family plumbago (graphite) business. He makes another trip to Cape Cod. He is attracted to 20 year old Kate Brady, a Walden groupie. He meets Whitman in New York, and the two are wary of each other. He makes his first trip to Maine and publishes “Alagash”, part one of The Maine Woods. Thoreau is offended by the sexuality of Whitman.s Leaves of Grass but defends it against the critics.

“A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN”

------- Thoreau was forced by his extreme aversion to slavery to become involved in political activity after the execution of John Brown. In his lecture on the subject he says:

-------“It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. [A plea.. ‘59]

------- Thoreau also became involved in a minor way with the “underground railroad”.

NATURAL HISTORY and SCIENCE

------- As the decade advanced, Thoreau.s interests began to turn from philosophy to serious natural history and eventually to pure science. Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 and was soon read by Thoreau.

-------Richardson writes: "From Christian transcendental belief in a divine ordering principle …Thoreau gradually came to accept a view, for which Darwin was one more confirmation, that any ordering force in the universe must be sought in the developmental principle, most easily observable in the natural world in crystals or in leaves and in the spring of the year.... Walden was a testament to the centrality and integrity of the individual mind observing nature. The great new project would testify to the coherence of the observed world. ... a detailed circumference to Walden's shining center of light."

-------Thoreau writes: “There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation to be significant must be subjective. The sum of what the writer has to report is simply some human experience… The man of most science is the man most alive. [Journal ‘54]

-------“The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow star. [J ‘56]

-------“There is nothing inorganic. The earth is not, then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata upon strata like the leaves of a book, an object for a museum…but living poetry, like the leaves of a tree, -- not a fossil earth, but a living specimen. [Journal]

-------“Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship around the globe? … The earth is pregnant with law. [Journal ‘54]

-------“The development theory [Darwin’s] implies a greater force in nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation.”

-------Compare the neo-Darwinists, E.O. Wilson, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennet, et al, and the summer 1992 NYT review of Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram’s thesis that the universe is like a computer, and its complexity is generated by simple rules.

THOREAU’S DEATH

-------To his Aunt Louisa, who asked if he had made his peace with God, Henry said, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.” To Parker Pillsbury’s comment, “I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you,” he replied, “One world at a time.”

-------Walt Whitman wrote in 1888: "Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters...he was a force --- he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame." Emerson said, "There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition."

CAPE COD and THE MAINE WOODS

------- These books were published shortly after Thoreau’s death. Cape Cod is an enjoyable travel-book but also a comparison of nature and evangelical religion. The chapter on Eastham preachers is amusing.

-------The Maine Woods, which brings together the three talks Thoreau gave on his several trips to Maine, is a description of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants and an impassioned protest against depriving Americans of the "tonic of wildness.” Thoreau’s Journals were not fully published until 1908.

A READING

-------Selected paragraphs from “Walking” (published 1862, based on his talk, “The Wild,” first given in 1850/51):

-------How near to good is what is wild! Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.…. 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.”

-------The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world…. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. … The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were. I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

-------[The intentional echoing of the Christian creed in the preceding sentence is an example of Thoreau’s in-your-face pantheism.]

-------We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest brightest morning sun-light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still. p>-------The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash [muskrat] looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright—I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening.

-------So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.