Yes, we know—reading and understanding Thoreau is not easy. His fellow Concordians often misunderstood him, and he loved contradictions– think paradox, pun, and satire. Rather than being deterred, let’s have a sense of adventure. We can question, experiment, observe, mull it over, and consider multiple meanings. All Thoreauvian paths. One scholar (Swartz) recommends that we “must drift with Thoreau. In this connection T.S. Eliot’s statement that poetry ‘communicates’ before it is ‘understood’ seems instructive.”
Thoreau condensed two years of living into one year of narrative. The book is unified by a cyclical pattern following the seasons. He’s also looking for what Buell calls “patterns of significance:” moving from empirical experience to the spiritual, economic, mythic, and even didactic is the soul of the book. There’s also a pattern of contrasting chapter themes. For instance, the meditative “Solitude” is followed by “Visitors.” Buell identifies several overall contrasts:
“body versus spirit; philosophic versus practicality; individualism versus social responsibility; physical isolate versus social involvement; and the implied hypocrisy of the author.”
So if you notice all the contradictions, that’s part of the gig.
One way to handle this is to enlarge our understanding of Walden’s narrator, the “I” speaking to us. Of course it’s Thoreau, AND it’s a voice larger and deeper than just the man. Sullivan remarks,
As a writer, you work on your “I”—tone it up or down on occasion or, conversely, push it—and when you succeed, you develop an “I” that is true to you, as opposed to being truly you, a crucial distinction….The successful “I” is not false, but it must be what the “I” in Walden claims to be—extra. The extravagant you, the extraordinary author, who is, in life outside the book, likely to be ordinary, due only a peck of dirt….The author of Walden is different from the “I” in Walden, even if they are the same person.
I handle all this with that bit from Whitman in Song of Myself,
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
This is our extravagant extra-vagrant Thoreau, answering his own call of how to inhabit the world.
Buell reminds us that travel fiction and the Lyceum circuit were popular, so Thoreau’s answer is a book of “spiritual travel,” viewing Walden as a “romantic excursion…a record of events and impressions as it is a poem….There are all sorts of meanderings and digressions.”
So rather than being chronological, Walden is more a weaving of different types of narration. What Lane calls “organic structure–a patterned movement that is formal, narrative, expository, rhetorical, and above all, mythic.” Let’s look at that.
Traditionally, mythic narratives are intrinsically linked to nature— think Native Americans, Norse, ancient Greeks—humans are made from clay, corn, dirt; the gods get angry and natural disasters ensue. Our inherent capacity for storytelling weaves human experiences with the natural world in a search for meaning.
There are different levels of the mythic in Walden. We have frequent concrete references to a variety of myths, spiritual texts, and parables. On a larger scale, Thoreau mythologizes his experience and the pond itself. He romanticizes farming and husbandry in the pastoral tradition. One example is the transformation of physical work hoeing beans into a spiritual meditation. What is Thoreau “cultivating”? Remember this is an experiment in self-cultivation, which Thoreau literally grounds…in beans. Yeah, it’s funny too. So we can even see Walden as mock heroic epic, Thoreau’s performance art, living in the woods as a quest for the perfect life and self-fulfillment.
The pond is of course a symbol: “earth’s eye,” a “lower heaven,” and “God’s Drop.” The pond represents not only a gem of nature, but the awakening of a spiritually aware artist and consciousness, “I have several more lives to live.” Although Thoreau’s survey demonstrates the pond is not bottomless, he acknowledges the power of the idea: “I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.”
The power of nature as muse and the corresponding liberation of self are perhaps Walden’s most enduring themes. What does nature teach us about finding the truth within ourselves? Richardson neatly summarizes the answer: the necessity of courage to actually experience freedom, the necessity of natural laws that provide parameters, and the necessity of individual integrity and ethics to avoid despair.
Richardson terms Thoreau’s ethics “a kind of Hindu Stoicism” and an “ethics of intensity.” The Hindu sacred texts provided Thoreau with wisdom on pantheism, non-violent resistance, and knowledge for the sake of individual freedom. The Stoics—think Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca—found individual ethical direction internally sourced, informed by study and understanding of nature rather than a god or the state. While Emerson and crew certainly made Stoicism a cornerstone of Transcendental Idealism, Thoreau actually lived according to Stoic principles. He was able to live experimentally in the woods, participate in the abolition movement, and refuse to pay his taxes all because of his personal ethics rather than a belief in the higher power of the state or Church.
So what the Indian and Greek cultures developed separately, an ethical authority found in the placement of man’s divinity within nature, Thoreau assimilated into the voice of his narrator. By systematic knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and spiritual contemplation of the natural world, we gain a personal connection to that world, eliciting a sense of responsibility and nascent ecology, an “ethics of intensity.”
I think all this is why Walden speaks to us so deeply. It contains more than observations, instruction, poetry, humor, and parable. It weaves the mythic, spirituality, the power of nature, and ethics into an extravagant sense of applied scripture. We’re invited to a way of living founded on wisdom and intention as deep as that pond. We are continually invited to birth, morning, and awakenings. We are invited to purposefully inhabit a life of principles. Not necessarily Thoreau’s, or even all his influences. We have to find our own way. It’s just nice to have a super cool blueprint.
Sources
Buell, L. 1973. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Buell, L. 1988. “Thoreau and the Natural Environment.” Myerson, J. Ed. Critical Essays on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Boston: Hall.
Richardson, R. 1986. Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robinson, D. 2004. Natural Life, Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Shwartz, R. 1987. “Private Discourse in Thoreau’s Walden.” Bloom, H. Ed. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. New York: Chelsea House.
Sullivan, R. 2009. The Thoreau You Don’t Know. Harper Collins.