THOREAU IN OUR MIRROR
By Tom Hayden
A review of Walden, introduction by John Updike, Princeton University Press; 2004; W. Barksdale Maynard, Walden Pond , a history. Oxford University Pres, 2004s; Walden, edited by Jeffrey Cramer, Yale University Press, 2004; Walden, introduction by Bill McKibben, Beacon Press, 2004.
On the Fourth of July, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a self-constructed cabin at Walden Pond to ³live deliberately², a reclusive act that raised public consciousness ever since. On the 150th anniversary of Walden, published in 1854, several new editions of the classic are being published by Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Beacon and Shambala. Some, like those by Jeffrey S. Cramer, Terry Tempest Williams and Michael McCurdy,, are elegantly footnoted or designed, while the others explore the recurring significance of Thoreau as a mirror into America¹s nature.
Maynard¹s detailed history of Walden Pond itself, contains invaluable new material for students of Thoreau, including the bitter battle to save Walden Woods from developers in the 1990s, when the musician Don Henley raised millions of dollars to purchase over one hundred surrounding acres. The effort, according to Maynard, estranged local environmentalists who wanted a larger sanctuary, but on the other hand it prevented the New York tycoon Morton Zuckerman from developing Brister¹s Hill.
I have walked around Thoreau¹s pond two times, once in the Seventies and again last year. The evidence of encroachment is stark. The pickerel of Thoreau¹s time are extinct. Not long ago a trout was found with a diamond ring in its stomach. The depths of the 61 acre pond, at ninety feet and below, are lifeless except for sulfur bacteria. Outside the sanctuary, the pressures of suburban subdivisions and traffic on routes 126 and 2 only intensifies. At dawn, Thoreau¹s holiest hour, an electromagnetic gate opens the Pond to fishermen at dawn.
Walden Pond is no longer wild, but its drawing power only increases. One hundred thousand people visit Walden Pond during a typical July, as many as ten thousand on a Saturday. Some are simply family beachgoers, but most are transcendental pilgrims on their quiet paths. It has become their mecca. Annie Dillard wrote her master¹s thesis about the place. Rachel Carson kept Walden by her bedside. William O. Douglas cited the Pond¹s pollution to justify the 1964 federal Wilderness Act. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were affected early on, as was Pete Seeger. Arlo Guthrie named his cat after Henry (my wife named a dog). Beyond such individuals, millions of anonymous backpackers carry their own paperback editions of Walden wherever they seek respite.
And yet as Bill McKibben writes, the times are more perilous than when Thoreau questioned the coming of the railroad. McKibben locates Thoreau in a spiritual tradition including the Buddha, Jesus, and Saint Francis, whose visions were too much for their contemporaries. Now, McKibben says, the heirs of Thoreau ³among those trying to change our relation to the planet² face seemingly insuperable hurdles for which there is no technical remedy. But even with catalytic converters and countless other gadgets, he notes, Gallup polls show a decline of personal consumer satisfaction over the past fifty years. The answer for McKibbben, is that our way of life and thinking must change to seek non-material answers to non-material needs.
Thoreau was not a model activist in McKibben¹s terms. Reformers, he wrote, were ³the greatest bores of all². Nonetheless, McKibben believes we may live at a ³pivot of history² in which ideas of voluntary simplicity ³might suddenly flourish². McKibben doesn¹t know how the transformation will be achieved, but endorses Thoreau¹s ³overpowering confidence, in himself and the world², as an antidote to a paralyzing fear.
That¹s hardly a blueprint for the perplexed, but Thoreau mainly is remembered for the self-conscious life he lived, not organizational strategies which he scorned. He can be seen as a vital link in the creation of environmentalism, the person who embodied the change that others merely discussed in their parlors. He was a tenant handyman of Ralph Waldo Emerson¹s, took part in Emerson¹s salons and edited the Dial. Fifteen years younger than Emerson, lived the ³self-reliance² that Emerson extolled in writing. The liquid clarity of his sentences arose from the natural simplicity in which he was grounded. This Thoreau has challenged later generations to, so to speak, walk the talk.
In his otherwise admiring essay, John Updike disputes this version of Thoreau, saying that the ³urge to build a cabin in the woods² was a luxury, ³financed by the surplus that an interwoven, slave-driving economy generates.² Updike here joins the small contingent who accuse Thoreau of walking with clay feet. The list of other hypocrisies includes the brevity of his sojourn at Walden, the proximity of the Pond to town, his occasional strolls into Concord, and so on.
If the implication is that purity is impossible, that we all depend on economies of slavery or sweatshops or oil drilling, this can be a dangerous argument against trying to simplify at all. Updike can read his ten pound Sunday papers and vote for John Kerry with confidence that he has done what he can. Updike doesn¹t go this far, but for McKibben the danger is real.
The problem is that Thoreau cannot be understood through Walden alone. The danger is that he has become a harmless icon whose example is salutary but seen as obsolete. One wonders if these prestigious publishers will issue new editions of the whole Thoreau, who drafted ³Civil Disobedience² (1849) while at Walden Pond, who penned ³Slavery in Massachusetts² (1854), ³A Plea for Captain John Brown² (1860), and ³Life Without Principle² (1863), who kept thirteen notebooks on native Americans, and whose last mysterious words were ³moose² and ³Indians², or whether Thoreau will be reduced to an ascetic hermit. (The same reduction has happened to the Buddha, Jesus and St. Francis, it might be argued.)
In 1960, I was spellbound as a student editor listening to a representative fresh from the Southern sit-ins cite Thoreau¹s refusal to pay taxes for the Mexican war. His conversation from jail with Emerson ¬ ³Why Henry, what are you doing in there?², ³Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?² ¬ was the most powerful expression of the credo that carried thousands of young people, mostly African-American but some whites as well, to fill the Southern jails against racial segregation:
³A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.²
The same Thoreau inspired the resistance to the Vietnam War and to domestic police brutality:
³Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the nIndian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them.²
It was this Thoreau that framed the issue of voting in a larger moral context:
³Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, by your wholen influence.²
Updike to his credit notes that ³Thoreau¹s recognitions endeared him to the revolutions of the 60s². But he describes his later years as filled with a ³notorious² and ³fiery championing² of the ³grim killer² John Brown. In those years, says Updike, Thoreau echoed the abolitionists¹ ³shrill adumbration of bloody war². This is the same Updike who earlier criticized Thoreau¹s retreat to simplicity as a luxury financed by the ³slave-driving economy.²
Since Thoreau drafted both Walden and ³Civil Disobedience² in the two years spent at Walden Pond, we must conclude that there was only one Thoreau, not an ³earlier² nature writer and a ³later² champion of Indians, Mexicans, tax-refusing war resisters, and violent abolitionists. The linkage between all the issues Thoreau addressed was to live naturally wild and free, like the rest of Creation, not in conformity to institutions or dogma. ³Action from principle², he wrote in ³Civil Disobedience², ³the perception and the performance of right, - changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was.²
In essence, action ¬ the fully-lived life ¬ creates an evidence of its own that the social order can change, just as the natural order changes through the drama of evolution. Have faith in the seed.
The lesson of Thoreau is not that environmentalists and nonviolent spiritual seekers should retreat from the worlds of poverty, racism and war, or focus on voluntary simplicity alone as the antidote to consumption. Their natural dignity, he seems to argue, requires that they understand themselves as carriers of a ³wildness² that resists all bondage. To be faithful, if we would follow Thoreau into the woods, should we not follow him to the prison cell? If we respect the reasons he retired to his cabin ¬ a radical act at the time - understandable, why not admire his defense of Captain John Brown?
³No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood toŠ²
³It was through his agency, far more than any other¹s that Kansas was made freeŠHe was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common and Bunker HillŠ²
Thoreau¹s call is to live heroically as nature does, to feel both the inner and outer as one, to link personal self-reliance with direct action in the world, and to resist the nature of any state that does not conform to the state of nature. |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
