In Thoreau Country: A Perspective on Today's America

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”

Ever since I read Walden over two decades ago, I sometimes dreamed that I was transported back in time by a century and a half to sit on that second chair one evening and have some heart-to-heart with Henry David Thoreau.

“Do you think I am leading a life of quiet desperation?” I might begin. Or perhaps something lighter: “How are those beans coming along?” Or maybe inquire after the health of his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. How about the fate of farmers mortgaging their souls to the devil, that is, to bankers, for the false privilege of “owning” their homes?

There would be much to talk about as the moon rose over the pines and its reflection gave the Walden Pond an ethereal glow.

I found the possibility of dialogue across time elusive, so this summer – August 2017 - I decided to do the next best thing. I flew from San Jose to Boston with only one goal in mind, to see Walden Pond and feel Thoreau’s presence.

I boarded a Commuter Rail from Porter Square in the city of Monmouth in Massachusetts for Concord, the fabled town where Thoreau was born and in which he spent a significant part of his life reflecting on the human inclination for both savagery and nobility.

The train journey took me through the lush summer vegetation typical of summer in the Eastern United States. The green, a shade fresher than the green in Western U.S., reminded me of the green in Bangladesh where I was born.

After about an hour, I found myself in Concord. I looked out from the station and tried to imagine what Thoreau might have seen and felt. Oh, well, there was Starbucks as well as several auto workshops, a general store, an optometry shop, a bank.

I began the walk from Concord to Walden Pond, a distance of about a mile and a half. Thoreau would walk this path to and from his cabin for an evening meal at the home of his mother and brother and keep up with current events. He lived in the cabin for 2 years, 2 months 2 days, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847. How many miles did he walk in all? Thousands. No wonder he looks so fit in the only two photographs we have of him.

The walk took me by immaculate lawns and quaint homes with ancient trees spreading their ample shadows across grass and streets. It made the hot trek tolerable. Reminders of Thoreau were everywhere, from the Thoreau streets and lanes to markers pointing out where slaves hid a few years before the Civil War began, and some of whom Thoreau helped escape to Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The neighborhood was lily-white, so I was heartened to see a sign on a lawn that said “Black Lives Matter.” Thoreau, among the original abolitionists, would have smiled.

And then suddenly I was on hallowed ground. I was at the bank of the Walden Pond. Through the trees I could see the whole pond and its graceful finite shoreline enclosing infinite stories and memories.  

Walden Pond was not so much a pond as it was a poem, a magical, mathematical pi rather than a mere positive integer. People of all ages were sunbathing and swimming, about two hundred of them, with lifeguards sounding out solemn instructions from their high perch from time to time.

I swam in the waters of the Walden Pond. Opened my eyes underwater after a few laps and found the water as green as the vegetation around. A snapping turtle came by to check out the humans and unimpressed, turned back and disappeared in the dark deep waters. The water seemed cold at places and warm at others. Two enterprising tourists were rowing on a canoe, going further than any swimmer dared to venture.

In the winter of 1846, after the pond froze solid so that he could walk on it, Thoreau began to survey the pond. The instruments were unwieldy and heavy but Thoreau was undeterred. The "angle intersection survey" included the pond's perimeter, almost 2,900 feet. As described in the brilliant biography of "Henry David Thoreau, a Life" by Laura Dassow Walls, "with ax and ice chisel, he cut well over a hundred individual holes through the ice to lower the plumb line into the water ... Thoreau used the tools of science and engineering to create a remarkable work of art, a working survey that accurately mapped Walden Pond to the inch: length, breadth and depth ... it was 102 feet at the deepest point ..." This is how Thoreau summarized his work: "The line of greatest breadth intersects the line of greatest length at the point of greatest depth." The line is remarkable for the symbolism it contains for truth and purpose and life. In the incomparable prose of Thoreau: "It is the heart in man - It is the sun in the system ... Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets - and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character."

After swimming to my heart’s content, went to check out the Thoreau Center, selling all things Thoreau: books, pictures, mugs, candies, maple syrup, posters. Next to the souvenir shop was the replica of Thoreau’s cabin – a 10’ x 15’ house with a single bed and a large window that looked out on the Walden Woods - and a statue. 

An array of solar panels brought dignity to the parking lot. Sight of the sun’s energy being harnessed would undoubtedly have pleased the Bard of Walden. Thoreau wanted to live deliberately, that is, to live honestly with the full awareness of the consequences of his actions. For this original, singular act of courage, defiance and integrity, we remember him to this day with gratitude and humility. He pointed us all toward a better way, that a person is indeed “rich in proportion the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

On the walk back from Walden to the town, that is, Concord, I thought of the events roiling America these days. Donald Trump has emboldened racists and hate-spinners, turning America the Beautiful into America the Ugly. Thoreau would have walked the 550 miles from Concord, Massachusetts to Charlottesville, Virginia, to oppose the neo-Nazis, the Supremacists and the KKKs defiling the American ideal. On July 23, 1846, He spent a night in jail in Concord for refusing to pay a poll tax, fearing that the money could be used to pay for the Mexican-American War he opposed. How gladly he would have spent nights, if not years, in a jail if that’s what it took to free American from the shackles of the hate-mongers and the internal terrorists on the rise in Trump’s America!

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” asked a prescient Thoreau. Global warming is the undeniable reliability of our times but Thoreau saw it coming way before anyone else. He saw it but we don’t for one simple fact: We choose not to live deliberately. That includes both the affirmers and the deniers of global warming.

Raise your hand if you think of yourself as a modern-day Thoreau, if you can live deliberately as Thoreau did, even if only for a year in the wilderness by summoning the willpower to resist the digital seduction, if you can fight for justice and equality even while raising beans and being nourished by solitude.

What, no hands? None at all?

Thoreau and the Fourth of July

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a one-roomed cabin that he built with his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau wanted to "meet myself face to face," away from the intrusions of public opinion, government, religion, education and society. His twenty-six months of living in the woods provided him with materials for his masterpiece, Walden. The book is more bracing today than when it was first published and launched the environmental movement that we seem to take for granted.

But more than a paean to nature, Walden instructed us, by the example of its author, to live a meaningful life. It is this aspect of the book that explains its relevance and timelessness. Walden contains paradoxes and contradictions but precisely because of these, Thoreau's observations also ring so true. "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men get clothing ... since ... the principal object is ... that the corporations may be enriched." "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." "The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap and all the monkeys in America do the same." "In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high."

Writing of farmers saddled with debt (magnified several thousand times since then, and not just farmers), Thoreau wrote: "With consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair springs to catch comfort and independence, and then, as he turned away got his own leg into it." "And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him." Is there any more powerful, and poignant, summary of the havoc wrought on families throughout America by subprime and exotic mortgages than what Thoreau observed of his neighbors in Concord over a century and a half ago?

Yet Thoreau would also have lauded the progress America has made since Walden. A fierce opponent of slavery, he would have approved where America is today in relation to race. The democratic nominee for the president of the United States today is an African-American with a heritage that spans the globe. And while our materialism and the often toxic popular culture would have saddened him, he would also have taken heart in the green movement begun by grassroots organizations to save the planet from catastrophic climate changes. Yet there is also no doubt that the author of Civil Disobedience would have been outraged by the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq, illegal detention of both US citizens and foreign nationals, and use of torture and spying on Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment. A disobedience movement, civil or otherwise, would have been a certainty for Thoreau in such circumstances.

As we celebrate America's 232nd anniversary of independence, we feel the urgent need of a Thoreau who can motivate us to simplify our lives, persuade us not to become the tools of our tools, to recognize that "our inventions are wont to be pretty toys (Internet, iPod, cell phone, take your pick) which distract our attention from serious things. They are but impoved means to an unimproved end." We need a Thoreau to remind us that our greatest skill may lie in wanting but little, that "superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only," that we are "rich only in proportion to the number of things we can afford to leave alone." As we reflect on the challenging words in the Declaration of Independence, we should also set aside some time today to reflect on Thoreau's Walden. We will only be the richer for it.