On the Birthday of Henry David Thoreau

Walden Pond early fall

In the fall of 1994 I went to Walden Pond.  It was about as I expected, small, surrounded by trees wearing autumn gold leaves and appearing much as it had when Thoreau lived there in the mid 1840's and producing his most famous work, On Walden Pond, in 1854.  I was introduced to Thoreau as a junior in high school.  His thoughts on self-reliance, the illusions of progress and transcendentalism greatly influenced me and my budding views on the world.  I fell in love with Thoreau and his contemporaries who wrote pro and con at that time: Emerson, Alcott,  Longfellow, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Wadsworth and others.  I went to what is called "Authors' Ridge" in the Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where some of them are buried.  I imagined them rising up by the light of the Massachusetts moon and once again expounding on their deep thoughts and comparing notes on the what they now know to be true about the afterlife.

Sleep Hollow Cemetery
Author's Ridge

It was an amazing time in the history of American literature, one I often wish had been a part of.  In high school these long departed men and women of amazingly advanced theories and beliefs about the nature of life and living spoke directly to me over the centuries.  I wonder if they still are taught as reverently in school today as they were when I was a boy?  Surely some of their writings would cause quite a stir amongst the conservatives and great unread of today.

I was never a great reader, yet On Walden Pond, The Scarlett Letter, Moby Dick, all the essays and poetry of Emerson, all had a great impact on that impressionable mind of the young boy naive boy I was then.  How fortunate I was to have been taught by a wonderful English teacher, Nadine Dyer, who made it all come alive. And to this day, those who wrote of core beliefs in an ideal spirituality that "transcends" the physical and empirical and is realized only through an individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.  Whether one agrees or not with what they posited in their writings, they inspired thought and that is what is a most valuable lesson: how to think.  That, in my estimation, is something we don't instill in the new generations.  But I could be wrong.  I hope so.

It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau (books by this author), born in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He got his first glimpse of Walden Pond as a young boy; he wrote later: "When I was five years old, I was brought from Boston to this pond, away in the country, — which was then but another name for the extended world for me. [...] That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams."


Thoreau was a bright young man, but also good with his hands, and he planned to become a carpenter. His parents sent him to Harvard, and he excelled there, but he didn't like it much. He graduated in 1837, but had no career ambitions, and after a failed two-week stint as a teacher, he moved back home to work in his family's pencil factory. He and his brother opened a school, which also failed. A few years later, his beloved brother died, and Thoreau was even more lost. He spent a couple of years working for the Emerson family as a handyman and tutor, then went back to the pencil factory. He improved his family's business when he discovered an economical way to bind graphite and clay, and he seemed on track to spend the rest of his life manufacturing pencils.


Then, in 1844, 26-year-old Thoreau took a vacation and went fishing on the Sudbury River with a friend. It hadn't rained much lately so the woods were unusually dry. The two men lit a fire to cook up some fish chowder, but they lost control of the fire. The fire spread from the grass along the river to the trees, and eventually burned down nearly 300 acres of the Concord woods. Local citizens were furious, and whispered "woodsburner" behind Thoreau's back for years.


No one knows whether Thoreau's guilt over burning the woods had any connection to his decision, about a year later, to move to a cabin in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond — the experience that would inspire his most famous book, Walden (1854). He didn't write about the fire until six years later, in 1850, by which point he acted nonchalant about the whole thing. He wrote: "I once set fire to the woods. [...] I said to myself, 'Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.' It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still. So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it."