On July 4, 1845, a 27-year-old Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin near a lake called Walden Pond in Massachusetts, north-eastern United States. His goal, he wrote later, was “to live deliberately, to [con]front only the essential facts of life”. We learn of these and other words that speak of Thoreau’s intentions from the writings he left behind. His journals tracked his life from October 1837 to November 1861, eventually filling up 47 manuscript volumes.
The most famous of his books was Walden; or, Life in the Woods , an assemblage of sustained thinking about life in a rural setting, deeply felt psychological insights amidst everyday life and some sharp criticisms of the society around him. All of these are sketched out in an artful prose that is extraordinary in its attention to the sensuousness and specificities of reality. As a book that has survived generations, Walden lives on in the cathedrals of American literary consciousness as a sort of moonlt gargoyle, tucked away, sitting vigil over modernity and its discontents.
200th birth anniversary
In July 2017, as the politics of neo-nationalisms and hyper-patriotisms froths manically, America has begun to celebrate Thoreau’s bicentennial birth anniversary. For many, this is a moment of discovery. His words reveal — and not just to Americans — that it is possible to be a loving son or daughter of a nation, to be in thrall of its wilds and rivers and in admiration of its collective intelligence and spirit, and yet deny the strictures of convenient patriotisms. They also discover that more than his efforts to critique a society, it was his willingness to declare himself independent from social expectations, to live unburdened by convention, which made him a secular saint.
Today, Thoreau is known far and wide across America. But this knowledge is hazy and is almost reluctantly remembered, much in the manner one remembers a long-forgotten cat that returns every now and then to mew in the attic of American intellectual life.
Reading him in the month of his 200th birth anniversary, one can see what has attracted generations of readers and thinkers towards him. Thoreau emerges in our eyes as an archetype of independent thinking, a way to be free if only we had the strength and conviction to live life on our own terms.
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Schools with progressive curricula now teach their students excerpts from Walden . Whether high schoolers see in his life a quest for authentic living or merely self-indulgence is hard to tell. Over the past 200 years, however, not everybody has been welcoming of Thoreau or his influence. In early 20th century, the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes offered his curmudgeonly assessment that Thoreau was “[a] nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end”. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who wasn’t averse to seeing windmills for dragons, got a textbook of American literature proscribed from government-funded libraries because it contained Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. The children, the Senator presumably feared, might learn to defy family, society and government in the name of their conscience. Today, it is fashionable in many quarters to indict Thoreau as a humourless misanthrope whose mother supposedly did his laundry!
Few took Thoreau’s fierce commitments with an unyielding earnestness as much as Mahatma Gandhi did. As per Gandhi, Thoreau’s ‘civil disobedience’ “contained the essence of his political philosophy” A few decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. summarised Thoreau’s ideas on civil disobedience even more succinctly: “The basic aim was to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.”
These history-changing admirers and students of his words notwithstanding, Thoreau’s loci of investigation, the site of transformative possibilities, remained the individual. Society, unlike for his contemporary Karl Marx, mattered to Thoreau only insofar as it could be used as a tool to aid the individual’s fullness of being. To this end, Thoreau’s life was dedicated towards improving his own mind and morals.
He did so by studying an astonishing variety of books, through an investigation of nature around him, and by understanding his own ethical commitments. All three aspects took inspiration from the religious literatures of the East, particularly India. Thanks to his neighbour and friend, the great writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau discovered the Bhagavad Gita and Samkhya Karika . These texts prodded an already sensitive young man towards a contemplative and observation-filled way of living.
Thoreau’s willingness to see himself as a devotee of Nature’s omnipotence led him to oppose two key forces of his times: one, the expansionist instincts of America’s nascent industrial powers, and two, the overbearing omnipresence of the Christian church. The former led him to till the soil for the saplings of the anti-capitalist, deep-ecology movements that would sprout nearly a century later with Rachel Carson. As for the Church and its claims, Thoreau had little use for it.
Nature was the one true God he worshipped and his own writings and sweat in its service were one true offering. Thoreau’s life was dedicated to discovering the world as it truly was — a world of sensations and sentiments shorn of ornament, machines, or even history. He, like the rest of us, probably didn’t succeed. But, his efforts teach us that if we wish to witness this unconcealment, a small hut by a lake can contain the world itself. We only need to learn to see it.
