A Word on H.D. Thoreau

Probably someone who styles his blog "Waldenswimmer" ought to say something about Henry David Thoreau once in a while, just for the sake of authenticity. I recently found my copy of "Walden," a little the worse for wear, perhaps understandably when the cover indicates I paid $1.00 for it, even though it's an edition we would now call a trade paperback. I have to read for a long time before I come to a line I don't remember word-for-word; I've read it that many times.

I suppose the thing I like most about Thoreau is his unquestionable sincerity and enthusiasm. The prose of "Walden" is a little archaic, even after considering that most of it was written in the early 1840's; nevertheless, he got his ideas across, sometimes with stunning insight. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He wondered, mainly, whether this condition was necessary. I don't know what his answer really was. I think he may have found answers for himself but not for the mass of men, although he never had intentions of being an elitist. He was trying to find, in his noble experiment, answers of general application. The peroration of Walden dwarfs the loftiest self-help bromides of Dr. Phil or Dr. Wayne Dyer (all these "doctors.") "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." For years I kept those words taped to my bathroom mirror.

Thoreau, perhaps, was not what we would now call a "complete" man. He wasn't fully "realized" because he didn't have a wife, or family, or even a solid body of work. His writing is full of the untempered defiance of youth because he didn't outlive his youth. He was born in 1817 and died of tuberculosis in 1862, just short of his 45th birthday. The two years and two months at the Pond were spent in his late twenties. Nevertheless, his penetrating intelligence was such that he saw through to eternal verities from the start. This seems to me the defining characteristic of great genius. It seems impossible for someone to overcome the limiting prejudices and conceptions of his era and write something true not just for the moment, but for the ages. Thoreau did exactly that. Living and writing in an environment, the New England of the first half of the 19th Century, that we might now consider idyllic, he nevertheless foresaw and described the horrors of the Industrial Revolution and what it would mean for modern life as men were increasingly forced into roles as cogs in an immense social machine.

160 years after Thoreau spent his 26 months at Walden Pond, we now see what life is in a "globalized" economy and observe, in its fully realized form, the sense of pervasive helplessness that now afflicts a human species completely alienated from its natural environment. I think about problems like global warming and reflect that Thoreau, musing in 1845, noted that even then there were "professors of philosophy but no philosophers." So today, while everyone continues to drive the same cars, heat the same huge houses, fly anywhere they want in the jumbo jets that deposit CO2 right at the atmospheric level where it does the most damage, we judge the relative "virtue" of our polluting friends and neighbors by their "attitudes" about what they're doing. If they feel bad about it, and talk about the books they've read on the subject, they can do whatever they want. Someday we'll begin dealing with the problem, someday when it's not as inconvenient. A celebrity might have houses in West L.A. and in Martha's Vineyard and sear the atmosphere with a CO2 contrail of Heat Death, but if she drives a Prius and makes the right noises, she's a heroine for the modern age.

Thoreau would have laughed ruefully at all of this, then gone for his morning swim. His virtue was its own reward. He would have been more out of place in this day and age than ever, his drummer striking a cadence, measured and far away, which we simply can't hear anymore.