Walden

"Goethe’s last words were a request for more light—he famously called out ‘more light! more light!’ I think this is what Thoreau was really getting us to think about. What does it mean to ask for more light? What does it mean to truly see? What does it mean to be fully enlightened? Not only in the grand story sense, but what does it mean to be awake to others, awake to nature, awake to ourselves, and awake to the little voice—what the Greeks called a daimon —that tells us what not to do? Thoreau’s Walden is asking us to think that through. “Walden opens with a discussion of economy, but this word comes from the Greek word οίκος which means ‘to dwell’ or ‘to make a home’” I picked Walden because it resonates so clearly with our present day concerns and circumstances. Walden opens with a discussion of economy, but this word comes from the Greek word οίκος which means ‘to dwell’ or ‘to make a home’. That’s what ‘economy’ initially meant. Think how far that is from how we think about our economic lives today. Thoreau asked the question ‘What do you really need?’ You need shelter, food, some sort of clothing, and the right type of companionship. That is the economy of life. And you can be largely self-sufficient, which is something that we today, in our capitalist system, have lost. Walden is definitely that reminder that we can get back to the basics. As he says: “simplify, simplify.” He did. The book inspired Gandhi’s Satyagraha (‘self-sufficiency’). During the time that he was at Walden, Thoreau was writing not just Walden but also Civil Disobedience, where he argues that we should not implicitly support a government that does not hold moral ideals firmly. That’s implicit in Walden as well. Thoreau was trying to distance himself from conventional society and politics, just enough so that he could get a critical perspective on them. And why are we not civilly disobedient? Why do we not risk ourselves in political activism? Thoreau suspects that one of the reasons why we don’t risk ourselves in political activism is that we have our lives so bound up with material goods, that we sacrifice so much if we don’t pay our taxes, for example. We have so much to lose. But Thoreau says, if you simplify your life down to the bare essentials then maybe you’ll notice that you have, first of all, more time to dedicate to social and political activity, but also the willingness, insofar as you’re not so afraid of losing things, losing material goods, losing your very luxurious way of life. Those are a few of the reasons why I picked Walden as one of my five books. That’s right. If you go to Concord today, you see some really beautiful houses. If you think about the house where Emerson’s family lived above the Concord battlefield, this is a gorgeous huge house. So too is the Bush, which is the house that Emerson bought upon his return to Concord. Thoreau did something a bit different: he bought a hut (he didn’t build it from scratch) from an Irish working family. He disassembled it and then reassembled it on his site next to the pond. He lived in a hut that would not be standard for his education or socio-economic status. This is one of the points he was trying to make: we do not necessarily need luxuries. This was like Diogenes living in the barrel. What’s also interesting is that Thoreau’s house, after he left Walden, was sold off, disassembled, and made into a pigpen. It seems sort of appropriate that getting back to nature also involved Thoreau’s cabin being resassembled as a home for half-domesticated beasts. That’s right. But Thoreau was definitely aware of recycling. If we think about Emerson’s ‘Circles’ from that first series of essays, we see the idea that what goes around comes around, and the idea that there should not be waste. What most people think of as waste, he recognised can be used and be used to good effect. Thoreau was not above eating acorns. He wasn’t above eating wild apples. He said that these too could be delicious. It is. It’s probably the quickest read out of the five books that I’ve recommended. He said in Walden ‘in most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained.’ There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. If we think about the accounts of our lives that we are giving, and that will be with us as we meet the grave, I think Thoreau’s Walden, but also in his Journal , gave us models for what good last words might sound like. That’s true. To some extent, philosophy’s attempt to be objective or to maintain a god’s eye view of things—such as you see in rationalism and, unfortunately, also in some forms of contemporary analytic philosophy—implies a dismissal of the personal. While I do not think that all philosophy should be personal, I don’t think that it should be a strike against you if you decide to do philosophy personally."

"Well, in 1845 the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau went out to live in the woods of western Massachusetts. He lived two years there, and a few years later he wrote a book about his experiences called Walden; or, Life in the Woods . It’s an account of how he went about the practicalities of simple living. It’s about how he built his house – a log cabin – with his own hands, grew his own food and lived a subsistence lifestyle. And it’s about what he did when he was there, like observing nature and swimming in Walden Pond. I think Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. Of course, he didn’t live in complete isolation. Every few days he walked into the town of Concord, to read the papers and have a chat with his mum. He was very open about that. But he wrote extremely eloquently about the advantages of paring down life to its essentials – of doing more than getting caught up in the commercialisation and industrialisation that was going on around him. Even more relevant now, I think. In the era of climate change, there’s increasingly a move to cut back on our carbon emissions. Thoreau would have totally fitted into that. He would have looked around today and said: If you want to live carbon-lite, a less high-consumption lifestyle, you’ll see plenty of ideas in my book for turning away from material culture – not depriving yourself, but embracing the beauties of nature and of free time, the ultimate luxury. Thoreau’s experience in Walden taught him that he could live extremely cheaply and he didn’t have to work very much. In fact, he said that he could work as a part-time surveyor for about six or seven weeks and have enough to live on at Walden Pond for a year. Thoreau was always sceptical of what people called “civilisation” – accumulating material goods, moving into a bigger house. He viewed those things as burdens. He saw that having a massive mortgage was just going to tie you down and limit your freedom. Somewhat romantically, he thought you’d be much better off living in a wigwam, like the indigenous native Americans. Thoreau famously said: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” That was a message that he very much wanted to spread, at least through his own example. He saw the stress faced by farmers around him, who were trying to pay off their mortgages and improve the material quality of their lives. And he thought that it was much more luxurious and enjoyable to sit in the doorway of his cabin and listen to the birds sing, than to try to earn enough money to buy a new sofa. Thoreau was an extraordinarily realistic person. I don’t think he actually thought that everyone should live in the woods. What he was really saying was that wherever we live – even in urban society – we can simplify our lives. And that way, in purely practical terms, we probably don’t have to work as hard to support our lifestyle. And if you don’t have to work as much, you have more free time. Free time, for him, was the ultimate freedom. I think he would say to us now: Even if you are living in a high-rise flat in Paris or Berlin or New York , if you simplify your life then you can learn that it may be more enjoyable to take a walk in the park than to drive an expensive car around. That’s something that everyone can do without having to go and live in the woods. So Thoreau has a very realistic message for us, especially now that a third of people feel time-stressed or time-poor. What they really want is the freedom to not be tied down to jobs they don’t want to do or debts they wish they didn’t have. That’s right, and I think that idea of walking to the beat of your own drummer is a vital lesson for the art of living. What he’s saying there is that we don’t need to conform; in a way we need to break the rules. There have always been inspiring figures in history who have done that, and Thoreau is one of them. Mary Wollstonecraft is another – she became an author in an age [the 18th century] when no women did so, went to revolutionary France, had a child out of wedlock and so on. She was walking to the beat of her own drummer, and I find that personally inspiring. From everyday things like rejecting the culture of watching TV for three hours a day and locking your TV in the cupboard, to maybe leaving your well-paid job to do something which embodies your values more, we need to walk to the beat of our own drummer if we want to live a more experimental and adventurous life."

"Walden is a book that I have loved since I was 14 or 15. I actually grew up in New England, where Thoreau writes Walden from, so I suppose the book has a special resonance for me. Thoreau sets out as a young man to investigate how simply he could live. The book is about his awareness that, even in 1845, America was already becoming highly commercialised. He discusses how the original ideals that America was founded on were being compromised, and how massive industrial interests were starting to dominate. This is a trend which has continued to the present day, and is an important theme relating to my own interest in bioethics, with the commercialisation of the human body. Thoreau isn’t writing a political tract, but rather a pithily written and often humorous personal account. He is probably the greatest English prose stylist of his day, if not of ours, not least because many of his central points are expressed as epigrams, aphorisms or parables. His thinking about commercialisation is also put in that fashion, with a fantastical metaphor of a farmer neighbour whom he met walking down the road, pushing his barn before him. It encapsulates Thoreau’s strong sense that the once independent American character was being simultaneously overloaded and undermined by acquisitiveness and consumerism."

"In Walden, Thoreau addresses himself to an imagined audience of New England readers. Walden can be seen as a meditation on the question of whether people in general, but New Englanders in particular, are awake and aware of their own experience. “ Walden is not about wilderness—it’s a commentary on New England at the height of its transformation by human hands” Thoreau can be thorny to read, but Walden is a tremendously important work in the history of environmental thinking and in the history of understanding our relationship with nature. There is a misconception that Walden is a paean to the natural world; it’s not. Thoreau is living in Concord, a town that has been colonized and farmed and altered by human beings for more than 200 years before he built his cabin. Although he lives in proximity to a pond, the railroad also ran nearby. Walden is not about wilderness—it’s a commentary on New England at the height of its transformation by human hands. On the one hand, of course the colonists were nonconformists; they were dissenters who would not conform to the dictates of The Church of England. On the other, partially because of the high levels of homogeneity in that colonization project, the Puritan founders of the New England colonies marginalized and even exiled outsiders. The way churches developed in the area is called “the New England way.” A culture that has a “way” is a culture that is expecting people to conform. So, there is tension between the nonconformist roots of New England and the calcification that set in when New England ways became custom. That is one of the things that Thoreau is trying to wake people up to. He had seen a lot of states, by 1871, and had just returned from his famed European tour. Compared to much of the rest of the United States, the civility of New England towns, the schools, the churches, and the aid societies, the structures of New England towns, the tidy town greens and their radiating roads, all of these things we’re done much better in New England. People think of Twain as a frontier writer, but he was often very disparaging of how things were done on the frontier. So, I’m guessing that assessment might have a lot to do with his preference for New England ways."

"My third choice is Walden by Henry David Thoreau . I think Walden is the least readable of the books that I’ve chosen, because it starts with a long, rambling passage about what he thinks about the state of politics and economics. It includes his famous line “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” You’re right that it’s important, but it’s hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature. Thoreau did a fair amount of travelling, outside of Walden . In his other books he goes on these long hikes. This book is really about travelling into wilderness. I don’t think that travelling need involve going very far. You could travel within a few miles of your house. What’s crucial is to put yourself in unfamiliar surroundings. And I think that’s what he manages to do. There are these amazing, elegant, long passages where he describes sitting in the doorway of his cabin, lost in the sunshine and the birds flitting around the trees. Or where he’s looking out at the pond and describing the way the ice is frozen and the crazing of the cracks. It’s enchanting and it has inspired swathes of travel nature writing—as well as people going off and building their own cabins in the wilderness. There’s a craze right now for ‘cabin porn’—if you Google it, you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find. So many of the articles about it reference Thoreau’s Walden. There’s very much an underlying metaphysics—theory of reality. So where his friend (and senior tutor, if you like) Emerson is in love with nature and for Emerson nature is a symbol or a representation of God, for Thoreau nature is God. There’s no remove for him. When he’s looking into the ice at Walden Pond, he’s looking into God’s creation. The whole book, these beautiful nature passages, they feel very strongly anchored in this underlying philosophy of how the world is. With Thoreau I don’t get the vibe that he wants to be solitary in order to think. Rather, he wants to be solitary in order to be closer to nature. It’s a variation on the theme, but certainly seems very different to Wittgenstein, who wanted to be a solitary genius working out ideas without anyone to bother him. Yes, it’s an experiment, though if I’m honest, I personally am much less interested in the social aspects of it. I’m more interested in the engagement with nature. That’s what I really love about the book. It’s okay that other people like aspects of it that I don’t. That’s allowed."

"When he went to Walden, the goal was, on one hand, very practical: to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , as a memorial to his brother. The book that we love as Walden began there, in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond, where he immediately sounds the strong voice that we hear in Walden . But the voice of A Week is very different, quiet and meditative—both joy in life, and mournfulness for all that was lost, the natural world that was passing, that the two brothers had shared. It’s a very interesting mix, that, putting all these elements together. He grew up in a family of four children. The father ran a pencil factory attached to their home, and the mother ran their household as a boarding house. So, except when he was at the pond, Thoreau was always in big bustling households with lots of people around. So the notion that he was any sort of a hermit is a little hard to sustain. He was a bit eccentric, to be sure, but unless he was out walking alone, he was almost always surrounded by people. I think it’s best to understand Walden as, in the best sense of the word, a work of fiction. By that I don’t mean ‘it’s lies.’ It’s a work of art. It’s a kind of turning inward that becomes a turning outward, a question of discovering who he truly is, and what life truly is when it’s not being determined by all the social forces that we’re surrounded with. These can be the intimate social forces of any bustling household, or the conventions of town life, or the pressures of a very fraught political environment. Remember that this was the era leading up to American Civil War, and virtually all the women in his family—his mother, sisters, several of his aunts—were deeply involved in grassroots abolitionism. In fact, I think another reason for going to Walden was to sort himself out on this matter—to work out a whole world view, independently for himself, so he could return and engage with abolitionism and social reform in terms that felt true to him. Sure, this required a certain distance. But it’s interesting—the philosopher Stanley Cavell said something that still rings in my thoughts about Thoreau: the distance was “just far enough to be seen.” The Walden house was on the edge of town, near a main road, in sight of the railroad—a little distanced, but therefore , very conspicuous. People came because he was visible, and they were curious. You know, he could have put up a ‘keep out’ sign, but he didn’t. That to me is revealing. Instead, he developed a system: he’d put a chair out in front of the house if he was open to visitors. The chair was often out, and anybody who wanted could come by and talk. And when he removed the chair, it meant, ‘please respect my privacy, I’m working.’ Which meant, of course, that he was writing. People learned to respect that—and he got rude with those who didn’t. I called it “performance art” in my book, probably the most quoted sentence: I’ve known performance artists, and I think that it’s useful to understand Walden as a kind of deliberate, thoughtful, public performance, one that rings true because it was true. It allowed him to develop a deep part of his own thinking and belief in an authentic way. “I think that it’s useful to understand Walden as a kind of deliberate, thoughtful performance art” It never occurred to him, and it never occurred to his family, that he should be isolated. He loved his family, they were very close, and he still had responsibilities—so, they visited on Saturdays and he went home for Sunday dinners. And he does admit this in Walden , too, but people read right past it. As for laundry, Rebecca Solnit asked the right question: What other male author is condemned for not doing his own laundry? In any case, laundry was the job of the family’s Irish servants. I’ve wondered why we make this into a problem. Why would we reject the notion that he could have a loving relationship with close family? That he would go see then, and they would come visit him? That he had friends who would spend an afternoon or an evening solving the problems of the world with Henry? I mean, yes, there’s something attractive about the hermit, the monk. But total isolation was never the plan. As for monks, this was Protestant New England. He had no monastic models—although Thomas Merton shows the deep spiritual continuity. Yes, it was. It was well known in New England that if you cut down an oak forest, a pine forest would quickly sprout in its place. And if you cut down a pine forest, an oak forest would replace it. People had noticed this, but were immensely puzzled by it. It was a puzzle to Charles Darwin , too, and he actually mentions it in Origin of Species . Thoreau, who was earning his living as a land surveyor, hadn’t thought much about this until one of his assistants asked him, “Why is this, do you think?” Thoreau had no answer, and the realization that nobody else did, either, really got his mind going. He started to do what he did best, which was to study and hypothesize and develop a holistic—now we would say ecological—understanding of it. This was later in the 1850s, years after the publication of Walden . He spent the rest of his life elaborating on the ideas prompted by his initial insight. Near the end of his life, in September 1860, Thoreau was invited to give an address at the county fair, titled ‘The Succession of Forest Trees.’ His audience loved it, and it was reprinted all over the country. It was a very exciting philosophical, but also practical, solution to a problem, offering insight into the deeper workings of the organic world around us. While it’s now credited as a pioneering study in ecology, of course the concept of “ecology” hadn’t come into existence yet; without realizing it, Thoreau was pioneering a scientific field. And his research and analysis and conclusions have stood the test of time. They’ve been elaborated greatly in the decades since, but everything that he said has held up scientifically."