Original title page of Walden featuring a picture drawn by Thoreau's sister Sophia.
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| Author | Henry David Thoreau |
|---|---|
| Original title | Walden; or, Life in the Woods |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Published | August 9, 1854 (Ticknor and Fields: Boston) |
| Media type | |
Walden (/ˈwɔːldən/; first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.
The book can be seen as performance art, a demonstration of how easy it can be to acquire the four necessities of life. Once acquired, he believed people should then focus their efforts on personal growth.
By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period.
Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identifies many plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water, precisely dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, and recounts his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the supposedly "bottomless" Walden Pond.
Plot
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden opens with the
announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple
life without support of any kind. Readers are reminded that at the time
of publication, Thoreau is back to living among the civilized again.
The book is separated into specific chapters, each of which focuses on
specific themes:
Economy: In this first and longest chapter, Thoreau
outlines his project: a two-year, two-month, and two-day stay at a
cozy, "tightly shingled and plastered", English-style 10' × 15' cottage
in the woods near Walden Pond.
He does this, he says, to illustrate the spiritual benefits of a
simplified lifestyle. He easily supplies the four necessities of life
(food, shelter, clothing, and fuel) with the help of family and friends,
particularly his mother, his best friend, and Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Waldo
Emerson. The latter provided Thoreau with a work exchange -– he could
build a small house and plant a garden if he cleared some land on the
woodlot and did other chores while there.
Thoreau meticulously records his expenditures and earnings,
demonstrating his understanding of "economy", as he builds his house and
buys and grows food. For a home and freedom, he spent a mere $28.12½,
in 1845 (about $934 in 2018 dollars). At the end of this chapter,
Thoreau inserts a poem, "The Pretensions of Poverty", by seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Carew.
The poem criticizes those who think that their poverty gives them
unearned moral and intellectual superiority. Much attention is devoted
to the skepticism and wonderment with which townspeople greeted both him
and his project as he tries to protect his views from those of the
townspeople who seem to view society as the only place to live. He
recounts the reasons for his move to Walden Pond along with detailed
steps back to the construction of his new home (methods, support, etc.).
Henry David Thoreau
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For: Thoreau recollects thoughts of places he stayed at before selecting Walden Pond, and quotes Roman Philosopher Cato's advice "consider buying a farm very carefully before signing the papers."
His possibilities included a nearby Hollowell farm (where the "wife"
unexpectedly decided she wanted to keep the farm). Thoreau takes to the
woods dreaming of an existence free of obligations and full of leisure.
He announces that he resides far from social relationships that mail
represents (post office) and the majority of the chapter focuses on his
thoughts while constructing and living in his new home at Walden.
Reading: Thoreau discusses the benefits of classical literature, preferably in the original Greek or Latin,
and bemoans the lack of sophistication in Concord evident in the
popularity of unsophisticated literature. He also loved to read books by
world travelers. He yearns for a time when each New England village supports "wise men" to educate and thereby ennoble the population.
Sounds: Thoreau encourages the reader to be "forever on the alert" and "looking always at what is to be seen."
Although truth can be found in literature, it can equally be found in
nature. In addition to self-development, an advantage of developing
one's perceptiveness is its tendency to alleviate boredom. Rather than
"look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre", Thoreau's own
life, including supposedly dull pastimes like housework, becomes a
source of amusement that "never ceases to be novel."
Likewise, he obtains pleasure in the sounds that ring around his
cabin: church bells ringing, carriages rattling and rumbling, cows
lowing, whip-poor-wills singing, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and cockerels crowing. "All sound heard at the greatest possible distance," he contends "produces one and the same effect." Likening the train's cloud of steam to a comet tail
and its commotion to "the scream of a hawk", the train becomes
homologous with nature and Thoreau praises its associated commerce for
its enterprise, bravery, and cosmopolitanism, proclaiming: "I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun."
Solitude: Thoreau reflects on the feeling of
solitude. He explains how loneliness can occur even amid companions if
one's heart is not open to them. Thoreau meditates on the pleasures of
escaping society and the petty things that society entails (gossip,
fights, etc.). He also reflects on his new companion, an old settler who
arrives nearby and an old woman with great memory ("memory runs back
farther than mythology").
Thoreau repeatedly reflects on the benefits of nature and of his deep
communion with it and states that the only "medicine he needs is a
draught of morning air".
Visitors: Thoreau talks about how he enjoys
companionship (despite his love for solitude) and always leaves three
chairs ready for visitors. The entire chapter focuses on the coming and
going of visitors, and how he has more comers in Walden than he did in
the city. He receives visits from those living or working nearby and
gives special attention to a French Canadian born woodsman named Alec
Thérien. Unlike Thoreau, Thérien cannot read or write and is described
as leading an "animal life".
He compares Thérien to Walden Pond itself. Thoreau then reflects on the
women and children who seem to enjoy the pond more than men, and how
men are limited because their lives are taken up.
The Bean-Field: Reflection on Thoreau's planting
and his enjoyment of this new job/hobby. He touches upon the joys of his
environment, the sights and sounds of nature, but also on the military
sounds nearby. The rest of the chapter focuses on his earnings and his
cultivation of crops (including how he spends just under fifteen dollars
on this).
The Village: The chapter focuses on Thoreau's
reflections on the journeys he takes several times a week to Concord,
where he gathers the latest gossip and meets with townsmen. On one of
his journeys into Concord, Thoreau is detained and jailed for his
refusal to pay a poll tax to the "state that buys and sells men, women,
and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house".
Walden Pond, discussed extensively in chapter The Ponds
The Ponds: In autumn, Thoreau discusses the countryside
and writes down his observations about the geography of Walden Pond and
its neighbors: Flint's Pond (or Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Goose
Pond. Although Flint's is the largest, Thoreau's favorites are Walden
and White ponds, which he describes as lovelier than diamonds.
Baker Farm: While on an afternoon ramble in the
woods, Thoreau gets caught in a rainstorm and takes shelter in the
dirty, dismal hut of John Field, a penniless but hard-working Irish
farmhand, and his wife and children. Thoreau urges Field to live a
simple but independent and fulfilling life in the woods, thereby freeing
himself of employers and creditors. But the Irishman won't give up his
aspirations of luxury and the quest for the American dream.
Higher Laws: Thoreau discusses whether hunting wild
animals and eating meat is necessary. He concludes that the primitive,
carnal sensuality of humans drives them to kill and eat animals, and
that a person who transcends this propensity is superior to those who
cannot. (Thoreau eats fish and occasionally salt pork and woodchuck.) In addition to vegetarianism, he lauds chastity, work, and teetotalism.
He also recognizes that Native Americans need to hunt and kill moose
for survival in "The Maine Woods", and eats moose on a trip to Maine
while he was living at Walden. Here is a list of the laws that he mentions:
- One must love that of the wild just as much as one loves that of the good.
- What men already know instinctively is true humanity.
- The hunter is the greatest friend of the animal which is hunted.
- No human older than an adolescent would wantonly murder any creature which reveres its own life as much as the killer.
- If the day and the night make one joyful, one is successful.
- The highest form of self-restraint is when one can subsist not on other animals, but of plants and crops cultivated from the earth.
Brute Neighbors: is a simplified version of one of
Thoreau's conversations with William Ellery Channing, who sometimes
accompanied Thoreau on fishing trips when Channing had come up from
Concord. The conversation is about a hermit (himself) and a poet
(Channing) and how the poet is absorbed in the clouds while the hermit
is occupied with the more practical task of getting fish for dinner and
how in the end, the poet regrets his failure to catch fish. The chapter
also mentions Thoreau's interaction with a mouse that he lives with, the
scene in which an ant battles a smaller ant, and his frequent
encounters with cats.
House-Warming: After picking November berries in
the woods, Thoreau adds a chimney, and finally plasters the walls of his
sturdy house to stave off the cold of the oncoming winter. He also lays
in a good supply of firewood, and expresses affection for wood and
fire.
Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors: Thoreau
relates the stories of people who formerly lived in the vicinity of
Walden Pond. Then he talks about a few of the visitors he receives
during the winter: a farmer, a woodchopper, and his best friend, the
poet Ellery Channing.
Winter Animals: Thoreau amuses himself by watching wildlife during the winter. He relates his observations of owls, hares, red squirrels, mice, and various birds as they hunt, sing, and eat the scraps and corn he put out for them. He also describes a fox hunt that passes by.
The Pond in Winter: Thoreau describes Walden Pond
as it appears during the winter. He says he has sounded its depths and
located an underground outlet. Then he recounts how 100 laborers came to
cut great blocks of ice from the pond, the ice to be shipped to the Carolinas.
Spring: As spring arrives, Walden and the other
ponds melt with powerful thundering and rumbling. Thoreau enjoys
watching the thaw, and grows ecstatic as he witnesses the green rebirth
of nature. He watches the geese winging their way north, and a hawk
playing by itself in the sky. As nature is reborn, the narrator implies,
so is he. He departs Walden on September 6, 1847.
Conclusion: This final chapter is more passionate
and urgent than its predecessors. In it, he criticizes conformity: "If a
man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away", By doing so, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment.
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 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.
Themes
Memorial with a replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden
The site of Thoreau's cabin marked by a cairn in 1908
Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons: First, it was written in an older prose, which uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence. Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, paradoxes, and double entendres. He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers. And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out to understand.
Walden emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation,
and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that,
he argues, is the lot of most people. The book is not a traditional
autobiography, but combines autobiography with a social critique of
contemporary Western culture's consumerist and materialist attitudes and
its distance from and destruction of nature.
That the book is not simply a criticism of society, but also an attempt
to engage creatively with the better aspects of contemporary culture,
is suggested both by Thoreau's proximity to Concord society and by his
admiration for classical literature. There are signs of ambiguity, or an
attempt to see an alternative side of something common. Some of the
major themes that are present within the text are:
- Self-reliance: Thoreau constantly refuses to be in "need" of the companionship of others. Though he realizes its significance and importance, he thinks it unnecessary to always be in search for it. Self-reliance, to him, is economic and social and is a principle that in terms of financial and interpersonal relations is more valuable than anything. To Thoreau, self-reliance can be both spiritual as well as economic. Connection to transcendentalism and to Emerson's essay.
- Simplicity: Simplicity seems to be Thoreau's model for life. Throughout the book, Thoreau constantly seeks to simplify his lifestyle: he patches his clothes rather than buy new ones, he minimizes his consumer activity, and relies on leisure time and on himself for everything.
- Progress: In a world where everyone and everything is eager to advance in terms of progress, Thoreau finds it stubborn and skeptical to think that any outward improvement of life can bring inner peace and contentment.
- The need for spiritual awakening: Spiritual awakening is the way to find and realize the truths of life which are often buried under the mounds of daily affairs. Thoreau holds the spiritual awakening to be a quintessential component of life. It is the source from which all of the other themes flow.
- Man as part of nature
- Nature and its reflection of human emotions
- The state as unjust and corrupt
- Meditation: Thoreau was an avid meditator and often spoke about the benefits of meditating.
Origins and publishing history
There
has been much guessing as to why Thoreau went to the pond. E. B. White
stated on this note, "Henry went forth to battle when he took to the
woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and
opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the
world straight", while Leo Marx noted that Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond was an experiment based on his teacher Emerson's "method of nature" and that it was a "report of an experiment in transcendental pastorialism".
Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intentions during his time at Walden Pond
was "to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive,
by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life
in radically reduced conditions?" He thought of it as an experiment in "home economics".
Although Thoreau went to Walden to escape what he considered,
"over-civilization", and in search of the "raw" and "savage delight" of
the wilderness, he also spent considerable amounts of his time reading
and writing.
Thoreau spent nearly four times as long on the Walden
manuscript as he actually spent at the cabin. Upon leaving Walden Pond
and at Emerson's request, Thoreau returned to Emerson's house and spent
the majority of his time paying debts. During those years Thoreau slowly
edited and drafted what were originally 18 essays describing his
"experiment" in basic living. After eight drafts over the course of ten
years, Walden was published in 1854.
After Walden's
publication, Thoreau saw his time at Walden as nothing more than an
experiment. He never took seriously "the idea that he could truly
isolate himself from others".
Without resolution, Thoreau used "his retreat to the woods as a way of
framing a reflection on both what ails men and women in their
contemporary condition and what might provide relief".
Reception
Site of Thoreau's cabin, 2010
Street names in Concord, Massachusetts named after Thoreau
Walden enjoyed some success upon its release, but still took five years to sell 2,000 copies, and then went out of print until Thoreau's death in 1862.
Despite its slow beginnings, later critics have praised it as an
American classic that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty.
The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America".
It is often assumed that critics initially ignored Walden,
and that those who reviewed the book were evenly split or slightly more
negative than positive in their assessment of it. But researchers have
shown that Walden actually was "more favorably and widely received by Thoreau's contemporaries than hitherto suspected." Of the 66 initial reviews that have been found so far, 46 "were strongly favorable."
Some reviews were rather superficial, merely recommending the book or
predicting its success with the public; others were more lengthy,
detailed, and nuanced with both positive and negative comments.
Positive comments included praise for Thoreau's independence,
practicality, wisdom, "manly simplicity",
and fearlessness. Not surprisingly, less than three weeks after the
book's publication, Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed,
"All American kind are delighted with Walden as far as they have dared to say."
On the other hand, the terms "quaint" or "eccentric" appeared in over half of the book's initial reviews. Other terms critical of Thoreau included selfish, strange, impractical, privileged (or "manor born"), and misanthropic. One review compared and contrasted Thoreau's form of living to communism, probably not in the sense of Marxism, but instead of communal living or religious communism.
While valuing freedom from possessions, Thoreau was not communal in
the sense of practicing sharing or of embracing community. So,
communism "is better than our hermit's method of getting rid of
encumbrance."
In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson
judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity,
apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it
"womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost
dastardly" about the lifestyle. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier criticized what he perceived as the message in Walden that man should lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs. He said: "Thoreau's Walden is a capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish ... After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs". Author Edward Abbey criticized Thoreau's ideas and experiences at Walden in detail throughout his response to Walden called "Down the River with Thoreau", written in 1980.
Today, despite these criticisms, Walden stands as one of America's most celebrated works of literature. John Updike wrote of Walden, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden
has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist,
anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a
protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks
being as revered and unread as the Bible." The American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Walden with him in his youth, and eventually wrote Walden Two in 1945, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members who live together in a Thoreau-inspired community.
Kathryn Schulz has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious based on his writings in Walden, although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.
Adaptations
Video games
The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 bestowed Tracy Fullerton, game designer and professor at the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab with a $40,000 grant to create, based on the book, a first person, open world video game called Walden, a game,
in which players "inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which
will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods". The game production was also supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities
and was part of the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab in 2014. The game
was released to critical acclaim on July 4, 2017, celebrating both the
day that Thoreau went down to the pond to begin his experiment and the
200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. It was nominated for the
Off-Broadway Award for Best Indie Game at the New York Game Awards 2018.
Furthermore, Walden was adapted into an iOS app published by a third party developer. Walden: Life in the Woods
is a quick play-through 2D game in which the player can, "explore the
woods surrounding Walden Pond and play Thoreau inspired mini games."
Digitization and scholarship efforts
Digital Thoreau,
a collaboration among the State University of New York at Geneseo, the
Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project, has developed a fluid
text edition of Walden
across the different versions of the work to help readers trace the
evolution of Thoreau's classic work across seven stages of revision from
1846 to 1854. Within any chapter of Walden, readers can compare up to seven manuscript versions with each other, with the Princeton University Press edition, and consult critical notes drawn from Thoreau scholars, including Ronald Clapper's dissertation The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text (1967) and Walter Harding's Walden: An Annotated Edition (1995). Ultimately, the project will provide a space for readers to discuss Thoreau in the margins of his texts.
Influence
Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain trilogy draws heavily from themes expressed in Walden. Protagonist Sam Gribley is nicknamed "Thoreau" by an English teacher he befriends.
Shane Carruth's second film Upstream Color features Walden as a central item of its story, and draws heavily on the themes expressed by Thoreau.
The 1989 film Dead Poets Society heavily features an excerpt from Walden as a motif in the plot.
The Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish makes several references to Walden on their eighth studio album Endless Forms Most Beautiful of 2015, including in the song titled "My Walden".
The investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. was named for the last sentence in Walden by founder and CEO Joe Mansueto, and the "O" in the company's logo is shaped like a rising sun.
In the 2015 video game Fallout 4,
which takes place in Massachusetts, there exists a location called
Walden Pond, where the player can listen to an automated tourist guide
detail Thoreau's experience living in the wilderness. At the location
there stands a small house which is said to be the same house Thoreau
built and stayed in.
Phoebe Bridgers references the book in her song Smoke Signals.
In 2018, MC Lars and Mega Ran released a song called Walden where they discuss the book and its influence.
