“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,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden.
Do I live deliberately?
Henry David Thoreau set out to live on his own in the forests outside of Concord, Massachusetts. 1854 might seem old-fashioned to us, but to Thoreau, the world was modernizing for the worse. He sought deliberateness in the trees, simplicity in the water, and self-reliance in the darkness and bitter cold of winter at Walden Pond.
Reading Thoreau is like entering a time capsule–the trickling of the stream and whistle of a winter owl–melting out any place into a blur of colors and muffled voices. Beneath me then were no longer the cold, clinical-blue subway seats. I was sitting in fresh soil, and the metal bar I leaned against became a tree.
I am planted in the Earth–not my phone, textbooks, or news–the Earth.
As the four train screeched against the rusty metal tracks, I remembered Thoreau, when as the distant Fitchburg Railroad train whistled by his humble cabin, he told his readers, “Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them.”
Rail workers lived in shanties beside the railroad that became a migrating mass of wooden planks and nails that moved with the assembly of the train tracks. Thoreau bought one of these shanties from an Irishman and his family of three for $4.25, on the condition that they leave the next day. Anne O’Conner, a writer for the Concord Bridge, poetically noted, “Thoreau immortalized his cabin through his writing. His new Irish neighbors disappeared into history.”
Thoreau preached self-reliance, yet he relied on the dirt-cheap Irishman’s shanty to create his own house.
Is there ever such a thing as true self-reliance?
The relentless cold of winter burned my face as I exited the subway station onto Bedford Park Boulevard. A whirlwind of voices and puffy jackets brushed by me.
A farmer–lonely, focused, dedicated. Thoreau, the “expert” of solitude, argued that although a farmer ploughed the fields and chopped wood alone, his work was keeping him company. When he came home to his family at the end of the day, he sat with them. This was not because he craved people, but because he feared to be “at the mercy of his thoughts.” Solitude takes bravery: it is to sit with yourself and your being. Being alone with distraction is not solitude.
Would I be afraid of my thoughts if I were alone?
Solitude could be found anywhere, and–depending on the matter of one’s mind–nowhere at all. Thoreau wrote, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Thoreau’s companion had once been his brother, John. They had opened the progressive Concord Academy together, a grammar school that implemented hands-on learning through exploring nature and local stores. But within the span of four years, both John, who got tuberculosis, and the school slipped away and became no more. Thoreau sought refuge, as the Walden Pond State Reservation website notes, this was “in part to move on with his own life after losing his beloved brother.” There was comfort in the weather, animals, and spirits of nature. Thoreau considered them all his companions, and for this reason he was never lonely.
The trees are so beautiful, how have I not noticed this? Perhaps the trees are my most loyal companions, and for this reason I never need to be lonely.
Contrary to assumptions, Thoreau frequently visited town and had friends visit his cabin. He “had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Some became friends, such as the Canadian woodchopper who logged the trees nearby. He was candid, humorous, and unashamed of his “primitive” lifestyle. The man’s empty desire to change bewildered Thoreau. “I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity,” Thoreau wrote,. Thoreau had a radical quality that undid the fabricated social structure: he recognized the potential of even the most unassuming person.
What does it mean to be smart?
My hand cramped as I frantically scribbled down the laws of exponents, in the ticking five minutes left of my Pre-Calculus class. Thoreau’s voice whispered in my head, “How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course…but the art of life.”
I want to learn through the tangible, the world through my natural eye. But how?
Peter Alden, a highly-respected naturalist, lecturer, and author of fifteen field-guide books from around the world, grew up in proximity to Walden Pond. I was lucky enough to meet him when I visited Walden Pond this winter. He recalls, “You want to fit in. You do not want to be too different, right? Well, I was a bird watcher, but I didn’t want the other kids to know I was a bird watcher. You know, when you have butt teeth and pimples and weird religion or whatever. And so it’s comforting to me to know that our hometown hero, Henry Thoreau, was a hell of a bird watcher.”
Although Alden was a passionate bird-lover, he was not always the best student in school. “I used some of his writings as a finding bird’s guide to my hometown. And I would bicycle around to different swamps and rivers.” Alden’s curiosity and passion for ecology has led him around the world writing in-depth books and leading tours for Harvard graduates. “I’m representing a university that would never let me in on my grades,” Alden said.
Alden has returned to his childhood hometown of Concord, and these days he spends his time working at The Thoreau Society Shop. He told me, “And so, I’m as Henry was–a pioneer, ecologist, a bird observer, not a bird killer, but a bird observing behavior of birds…living a life partly inspired by Henry Thoreau.”
Thoreau attended Harvard, yet he critiqued rote educational endeavors as frivolous. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The idea of necessity was rooted in Thoreau, through his lifestyle and mentality.
As I walked down the hallway, my pocket vibrated. I was about to pull out my phone, but instead I looked up. Up and down the hallway students’ faces were illuminated by the glow of their phones, their eyes down. Then there were those who walked forward, or chatted to their friends.
Do I need to look at my phone? Is it a “necessity”?
I turned off my ringer, putting it deep in my bag. There was a part of my mind, a hungry desire, that wanted to see what that notification was. But Thoreau’s voice echoed in my head.
“Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
It all began to come clear.
Nature does not need to be simplified, but the things that keep us from it do. The things I might hold nearest–frivolous attachments and anxieties–that is where we need to simplify.
I tapped my foot on the tiled floor, and looked up at my guidance counselor. In front of me was my life’s work–my high school transcript. Aside from that was a checklist, labelling all of the preparation I had to do as a junior anticipating college.
Am I unprepared? I feel like everyone else is ready. I don’t even know what I want to major in.
Critics dead and alive are not absent from Walden. If anything, they define Thoreau’s work. But Thoreau told himself, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
This checklist does not define me. Let it be, and let me be with it–and my unique future.
When Walden Pond began melting, life too began to thaw. Flowers bloomed and made the landscape a pastel painting of hope. After the second winter, Thoreau witnessed another spring, and left that September.
It was six p.m., and the static conductor announcement told me my stop was next. The train screeched, and halted to a stop–yet it felt different than in the morning. Not just because it was in the other direction. The train would keep going forward and so would I, no matter what I may dread about the future.
“My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock.”
Thoreau believed in the fluidity of life, and hoped for people to be unrestricted by the rigid order forming in an industrializing society. Unlike some authors, he was not afraid that the reader would lose attention. It is within its lengthiness that his writing comes to life, and the concentration it requires forces readers to stray away from the time-stamp lifestyle many live by.
There is only spending time, not wasting it. And does time even matter? Or is forgetting it the key to living deliberately?
Before I turned off the light to go to bed, I looked out the window, something I do not do enough. Stars can live for billions of years. One of these stars must have existed one hundred and seventy-eight years ago, when Thoreau sat by his cabin admiring the night sky. As he said, “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” Now, in a world I am not sure if Thoreau would admire, I sit staring at this same star.
Stars. “They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath.”
“Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.”
Perhaps I can live deliberately, perhaps I can’t. Perhaps I can be alone with my thoughts, perhaps I can’t. But one thing is for certain. Amidst the spinning world that I try to stand still on, I will always have that Thursday with Thoreau.
I am planted in the Earth –not my phone, textbooks, or news–the Earth.