If you visit Walden Pond in Massachusetts, it does not take much of a look around to realize that Henry David Thoreau, the famous author of Walden, was a fraud. His retreat in the woods was not a retreat at all, but right smack in the middle of nineteenth century suburbia. For an excellent look at Thoreau, the brilliant contemplative, see Leon Edel’s work Henry D. Thoreau. Edel wrote:

Of the creative spirits that flourished in Concord, Massachusetts, during the middle of  the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself. Less of an artist than Hawthorne, less of a thinker than Emerson, Thoreau made of his life a sylvan legend, that of man alone in communion with nature.         

BGC writes:

Thoreau was a great writer, and Walden one of the best ever non-fiction books. And yes he was an egotist; and his philosophy was hedonistic, selfish and ultimately nihilistic.

But interestingly, biographers suggest that he probably abandoned his Walden cabin specifically to return to the Emerson home and help-out with the house and children while Emerson was away travelling. Thoreau was especially fond of Emerson’s wife Lidian.

So, not entirely the cold fish of his writings.

Laura writes:

He was indeed a great writer. Walden is more a work of the imagination, a meditation on sundry aspects of living,  than a journal of self-sufficient living. Perhaps it is too harsh to call him a “fraud” because he does acknowledge that he is living on the edge of town. But he states that he has left “vicilized life” during his sojourn in the woods, which does not appear to be true. He had visitors and walked to town.

This is from Cape Cod, another of his great books on nature:

The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies, which the wreckers called Sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life, some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. I at first thought they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled. What right has the sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has such a boisterous shore that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against it?

Kristor writes: 

I loved that guy when I was in high school. He largely motivated my two winters of solo walkabout in the deep woods of Vermont. And I have to say that the beauties he described in Walden were really out there. He nailed it, dead right, spot on. One of the things I learned in the woods is that you don’t actually need to go into the woods to apprehend those beauties. I later found them on the farm, and in the town and city. But perhaps you do need to go into the woods in order to slow down enough to see them. Hard for me to say, now that I have indeed spent winters alone, deep in the woods, hearing only the muttering of the fire, the murmur of the brook, and the sigh of the wind in the trees for weeks on end. Maybe you don’t need to go as far as I did; maybe you just need to live quietly on a dead end street for a while. Maybe it’s just solitude that does it. 

I can’t feel too irritated at Thoreau for ennobling his experiences more than most of us would perhaps have thought to do; I understand that Walden Pond is not a particularly impressive place in real life. But so what? Isn’t that what writers do? Isn’t that an aspect of the essence of their art: to focus on an experience, plumb it, mine it, far more than folks generally do? 

Like Thoreau, I too left the woods for family, career, adventure, the city – and far further sojourns into wildernesses far deeper than comfortable old Vermont. But more to the point, I left solitude for society. My eremitical bent goes only so far, as I discovered. If I ever do enter monastic orders, I think I’ll stay close to the house.

Laura writes:

His intimate observations of nature are beautiful, as are his meditations on the contemplative life. He will always be inspiring. But Thoreau exaggerates the extent to which he was distinct from the farmer working just down the road and does not acknowledge that for all his preoccupations the farmer too may be in communion with nature, and not a brute.

Thoreau is spiritual nectar for the young as he counsels his readers to ignore the wisdom of elders, take nothing on face value, and look at the hard work of those who have raised them as so much unthinking slave labor. He writes:

“No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”

He continues:

What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new. …. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Kristor writes:

Gosh, it’s been so long since I read Thoreau that I had totally forgotten his anti-traditionalism. I never even noticed it in high school, because hatred of tradition was the milieu in which I grew up. The only place I got tradition was in the liturgy at church, where I was a choirboy. That’s where I first learned about beauty, too. 

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