[July 12th
marks Henry
David Thoreau’s 200th birthday! So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
five texts and contexts for Thoreau, leading up to a weekend post on three ways
we can remember and celebrate this unique and influential American on his 200th.]
On two new
frames for reading and understanding Thoreau’s most famous project.
On July 4th,
1845, just eight days shy of his 28th birthday, Thoreau embarked on the
two-year experiment that would become one of the most famous living
experiences (probably the single most famous such experience, in fact) in all
of American history. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the one-year,
condensed, narrative version of that experience which he would publish nearly a
decade later as Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854) is what we collectively remember so well. Indeed, the relationship
between the lived experience at Walden and the autobiographical text of Walden has become one of the central
areas of study for Thoreau biographers and scholars, and is certainly an
interesting (if perhaps overstated, since of course any and all life writing
involves shifts from the experiences to the written versions) aspect of the
text to consider. But on Thoreau’s 200th birthday, I wanted to gift
him and us all with a couple other, somewhat less common frames through which
to read and analyze both the sojourn at Walden and the text that it produced.
For one thing, I
think it’d be pretty interesting to see both Walden projects as offering
individualized examples of the period’s ubiquitous social movements. I don’t
mean the utopian
experiments such as Brook Farm
or Oneida, although
of course those make for interesting comparisons as well. No, I’m talking about
the era’s more grounded social movements, from the Abolitionist
Movement to which Thoreau himself was becoming connected in precisely this
moment (as I detailed in Monday’s civil disobedience post) to the national
Women’s Movement that would truly launch at Seneca Falls almost
exactly a year after Thoreau finished his time at Walden. While of course Thoreau’s
Walden project was both undertaken by himself and emphasized the importance of
solitude, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be linked to such broader social
movements, a link that (again) Thoreau’s subsequent addresses on civil
disobedience and slavery in Massachusetts would make clear. And within the book
we have passages like Chapter
2’s justifiably famous critique of capitalism and labor exploitation (using
the metaphor of “sleepers” to describe the workers who have given their lives
to build the period’s new railroad lines), sections that might seem quite
distinct from other aspects of the text until and unless we see the text as a
whole as a form of social protest and activism.
At the same time
that the Walden projects can thus be seen as profoundly social and communal, I
would argue that they also represent a particularly individual life stage: what
has in recent years come to be described as the “quarter-life
crisis.” Thoreau as the narrator of Walden
can come across as so confident (annoyingly
so, at times) in his accumulated experiences and perspective that it’s
difficult to remember (although it also makes sense if we consider the
confidence of youth) that his two years at the cabin took place before his 30th
birthday. If we reexamine one of the book’s other most famous passages (also
from Chapter 2) through this lens, it looks quite a bit different: “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.” Although this passage certainly
links to Thoreau’s preachy goals (his desire “to wake up my neighbors”), in it
we also see a young man unsure of both his own perspective and whether this
project will contribute to it (as reflected by the complex negative frames of “see
if I could not learn” and “not … discover that I had not lived”). Reading Walden as a memoir of quarter-life
crisis helps humanize Thoreau, and helps us understand that his philosophical
discoveries here are as much his own as for the audience to whom he then wants
to preach that gospel.
Next Thoreau
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Thoreau responses you’d share?
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