Living Simply. Not Simply Living
I read an article this week that was poking fun at and dismissing Thoreau’s solitary stay at Walden Pond. The reasons were that he could easily walk back home, and he did.
Henry David Thoreau lived at Walden Pond from July 1845 to September 1847, in a cabin he built on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. During those 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. He walked to town regularly. Concord was only about 1.5 miles away. He’d visit family and friends, pick up supplies, and yes, sometimes have dinner at his mother and sisters’ house. His mother did his laundry. He had visitors. The cabin wasn’t isolated. Friends, curiosity-seekers, and even runaway slaves seeking help on the Underground Railroad stopped by.
He wasn’t trying to set a hermit record. In Walden, he writes, “I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life.” So the image of Thoreau as a man who vanished into the woods and never saw another soul is a myth. A d it’s a myth he never claimed to be the truth.
But Walden is still a touchstone for simple, solitary living, because Thoreau’s experiment wasn’t about total isolation. It was about deliberate living and self-reliance — testing how little he actually needed to live well.
“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.”
He reduced his needs, built his own shelter, grew beans, and kept meticulous accounts to show you could live on ∼$28.12 for 8 months. The point was economic and spiritual independence.
“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
The book Thoreau wrote about those two years helped start American environmental writing, influenced Gandhi’s and MLK’s civil disobedience, and still shapes people’s ideas about a “simple living” philosophy.
Thoreau was opposed to the dogma of organized religion but took his spirituality seriously, treating July 4, 1845, when he moved to Walden Pond, as his own “spiritual independence day.”
He was a follower of transcendentalism, a 19th-century movement, largely centered around the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalists believed that individuals needed to form transcendent connections with the universe. For many transcendentalist philosophers, writers, and religious figures, that meant seeking it in nature.
Although Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining. So, it was as a prose writer that he made his most meaningful contributions as a stylist and as a philosopher.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862, in his native Concord.
You can live deliberately in Paradelle or Concord without going totally off the grid. Thoreau would probably say his cabin was just the lab. The real experiment is in your head.
Mist
by Henry David Thoreau, 1817 –1862
Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
This New England transcendentalist was a prolific poet, writing verse that, like his essays, tackled nature, man, and society. You can read some at poets.org. If you don’t mind reading on a screen, Thoreau’s books are all in the public domain, and on Project Gutenberg, where you’ll find Walden, and lesser-known works such as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Walking, and The Maine Woods.
In case you never have the chance to visit Walden Pond, go there virtually with Professor Larry Buell.
https://youtu.be/GV6nepqzrFc?si=jcGmbjquc_NevKwu
#essays #HenryDavidThoreau #isolation #poetry #solitude #Thoreau #Walden
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