Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  What, exactly, happened to Thoreau on Katahdin’s high slopes? Nothing was as he expected, not even the wilderness, which wasn’t wilderness at all. Even where the road ended, the houses did not, and even after the last house, there were logging camps and blacksmith forges, dams and log booms, trails rutted with use, even a billboard. The untouched forest had been logged, each tree cut and branded, its destiny not to reach for the heavens but to drop downstream through the falls to the sawmills. He saw neither wolf nor moose—not living, anyway. The Indians he saw were neither noble nor helpful. Even Katahdin refused him, harrying him with winds and mist, then smiling on him once he’d retreated to the lowlands.

  And yet, somehow, it was glorious, exhilarating. Back home at his writing desk, the pages piled high and higher through the fall; he’d never written better, and he knew it. What had happened to him? The turning point, he realized in retrospect, had not been on Katahdin’s rocky, cloud-whipped heights, where he’d braced for revelation and found a sublime nature that cold-shouldered him away, exactly as he expected. It had been in the peaceful meadow just below, where something far stranger had surprised him—“I found myself traversing it familiarly like some pasture run to waste,” rambling along, sampling blueberries, until the uncanny truth hit him and upended him: no man had ever farmed this land. “Only the moose browsed here, and the bear skulked—and the black partridge fed on the berries and the buds.” Here, on this soft and uncanny green, the ground fell away from under him. “Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth.” Not “Mother Earth,” either, but “Matter, vast, terrific,” not humanized in any sense but “a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world.”

  The most pivotal and most emotional passage in all of Thoreau’s work follows:

  What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

  Some see in these words only terror and alienation. To be reduced to a ghost possessed by an alien body is surely terrifying—an existential terror so profound that Thoreau saw here, at last, his limit point, his bedrock truth. Without flinching, he embraced it. What possesses him he will fully possess: “some hard matter,” “this matter to which I am bound,” this “actual world”—“rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!”107 The mystery that surrounds us, that touches us, that even caresses us, is us, all of us, for like all bodied beings we, too, are “hard matter in its home.” Thoreau’s response is to reach out, touch back, body to body: “Contact! Contact!” He brought nothing off the mountain but his own body, which he now knew was just as material to this planet—this “star’s surface”—as rocks, trees, and wind. On Katahdin, Thoreau found his truth. It was deep, even bottomless, yet deeply intimate and familiar—and utterly, unutterably wild.

  This meant, of course, that he had to utter it, had to find a new language as wild as the matter that bound him to this star’s surface. All that fall of 1846, Thoreau expanded the careful notes he kept in the field—scribbling notes even as the batteau was whirling up the rapids—into a long narrative, the basis for a popular lecture and then for his most successful magazine publication. There he would express the “inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest,” “home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian,” showing an America thinking to live by railroad and telegraph that their very houses were built of timber that “grew but yesterday where the Indian still hunts and the moose runs wild.” He saw even Concord’s familiar fields with new eyes: “Our fields are as old as God, and the rocks we have to show stamped with his hand.” The truth he brought back from Katahdin deepened his sense of kinship with the physical world around him: as he wrote that fall, “All material things are in some sense man’s kindred, and subject to the same laws with him.”108 Standing by the pond, looking into the night sky, he saw the stars themselves as “his distant relations.” To stand on some star’s surface was to put the heavens under his feet. Now he saw that the circles of Walden reached beyond human limits, touched the very stars above.

  Leaving Walden

  In Walden, Thoreau would dismiss his second year there as the same as the first, folding two years, two months and two days into one grand annual cycle. But in fact that second year was crucial to his experiment, for living through the cycle of seasons a second time allowed him to compare and consolidate. For instance, during the second summer, he debated whether to plant beans again, or instead “sincerity—truth—simplicity—faith—trust—innocence—and see if they will not grow in this soil.”109 He did that, but he also planted his crops a second time—beans, tomatoes, squashes, corn, and potatoes—only to see a hard frost on the night of June 12 kill them to the ground. While this deflected him from repeating his agricultural experiment, it also gave him time to tend his “wild stock” instead. One of his first acts at Walden had been to gather up boxes of wild fruits—red huckleberries and sand cherries, seeds of ironwood, hornbeam, and hackberry—for his friend Marston Watson, busy building his house in Plymouth and planting nurseries and orchards on the surrounding eighty acres. A few months later, in February 1846, Watson and Mary Russell, Thoreau’s “Maiden in the East,” were married. Thoreau kept up a lively interest in the fortunes of their growing orchard—a Walden writ huge.

  Now, through the winter of 1846–47, his interest in wild nature was exploding. His call to “contact” the world found fresh means and methods in science: at Katahdin he’d reserved one fine trout as a specimen, counting its fin rays; a couple of months earlier, he’d measured another from the river, painted its portrait in words, and keyed it out in the report on fish he reviewed in “Natural History of Massachusetts.” When the author’s son wrote Thoreau from Harvard about collecting birds’ eggs, Thoreau replied with happy reminiscences and invited him to Walden.110 The questions mounted. Thoreau, curious when a crew of ice cutters arrived on the pond, hacked holes in the ice to collect water temperatures. That got him asking how fish survived in the cold—the sort of question Louis Agassiz was asking, too. That winter, crowds gathered weekly at Boston’s Tremont Temple, as many as five thousand at a time, to hear Agassiz’s Lowell Lectures on the “Plan of Creation in the Animal Kingdom.” One of his favorite tricks was to draw a single fish scale, then—awing his audience—rapidly reconstruct more and more of the fish until it seemed to swim right off the blackboard. Thoreau was fired with enthusiasm. As soon as the ice melted, he was collecting specimens for the great man, and on May 3, Agassiz’s assistant, James Elliot Cabot, expressed Agassiz’s delight and thanks for three boxes of specimens Thoreau sent from Walden: a small mud turtle—“really a very rare species!”—a number of suckers, plus perch, breams, and a trout. Could Thoreau perhaps send more turtles? Cabot enclosed five dollars to cover expenses.111

  The lively exchange of letters and specimens continued. Thoreau did not merely collect, pack, and ship; he also “took toll” in a flood of questions. Why were his Walden pickerel different from those in the river? And the pouts, too? What species were the suckers?—the perch?—the shiners? What else would Agassiz like to have? “There are also minks muskrats—frogs—lizard—tortoises, snakes caddice worms, leeches muscles [sic], &c &c or rather here they are.” Would Agassiz like to come and see for himself? Near the end of May, Cabot reported that Agassiz was “surprised and pleased” at the extent of Thoreau’s contributions, among whic
h he found various species new to science. As for “the little fox” Thoreau sent, he was doing well in his new home—the professor’s backyard. And the final touch: Agassiz identified Thoreau’s Walden housemate as “the white-bellied mouse.” It was the first specimen of that species the professor had ever seen.112

  A whole new career for Thoreau was coming into view—so, at least, thought Emerson, who recommended Thoreau to his brother-in-law Charles T. Jackson, busy organizing a scientific expedition to survey the geology of Michigan. Thoreau was so keen to go that near the end of May he told a prospective publisher of A Week that the printing must be completed soon, since he was about to embark on “a journey of considerable length.”113 Jackson left for Michigan without him—competition was keen for this sort of opportunity. But what if Thoreau had been selected? Might he have gone on to join Agassiz’s expedition the following summer, to Lake Superior? This would have put Thoreau at the heart of Agassiz’s scientific circle, at the foundation of professional science in America—a circle that years later would include a young William James, who in 1865 joined Agassiz’s expedition to Brazil.

  This was not, however, to be Thoreau’s career path. The “white spaces” he wished to explore were not on the map, but in the mind. These two forms of exploration, outer and inner, converged in surprising ways: it was Agassiz’s assistant Cabot who shared with Emerson his excitement over the Bhagavad Gita, which Emerson knew of but had never actually seen. In June 1845 the Gita arrived in Concord; soon Thoreau was reading it. “He cannot be a Yogee, who, in his actions, hath not abandoned all intentions,” he copied into his Journal the summer he was jailed.114 The Gita became the closest thing Thoreau had to a personal Bible. That spring, the Gita open on his desk, he watched as Frederic Tudor, “king” of the New England ice industry, brought in a crew of Irish laborers to harvest ice from Walden Pond, cutting a thousand tons a day. Emerson was horrified. “If this continues,” he wrote angrily, “he will spoil my lot for purposes for which I chiefly value it, & I shall be glad to sell it.” Thoreau was delighted: he jested with the workers, warmed them at his house, and as he watched them build their “hoary tower—of azure tinted marble,” he imagined how the “parched inhabitants” of India would soon be drinking at his well. “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,” then go to the pond, “my well for water, and lo! There I meet the servant of the Brahmin . . . come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” Via a miracle of modern global commerce—the same miracle that had brought him the Gita to begin with—he could now hope to return the gift, uniting the sacred scripture of India with his new, modern scripture of New England. The wisdom of Walden would mingle with the waters of the world.115

  Thoreau had built his house to last. It’s easy to imagine him living there for the rest of his life, growing old and crotchety among the pines. Indeed, the iconic hermit of American lore lives there still. But Thoreau the living person did leave, and in later years the reason puzzled him: “Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. . . . Perhaps I wanted a change—There was a little stagnation it may be. . . . Perhaps if I lived there much longer I might live there forever—One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms.” Perhaps, he added in Walden, he had “several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”116

  More prosaically, he left because he was called away by someone he could not refuse—Lidian Emerson. Waldo was planning a yearlong lecture tour in Europe, where interest in Transcendentalism and in Emerson himself was growing. As late as August 29, it still appeared that Lidian would board with a friend while her husband was away, but suddenly she invited Henry to live with her and the children instead. Thoreau’s life at Walden had been Emerson’s greatest gift to him; if his friends needed a favor in return, he would say yes. A week later, on September 6, 1847, Henry Thoreau loaded up his books and furniture, closed his door, and left his house on Walden Pond. There would be no going back. On September 17, Emerson bought the house and leased it to his gardener, Hugh Whelan. With that done, on October 5, Henry, Lidian, and the Alcotts saw Waldo Emerson off at Boston Harbor, sailing for his great trip to Europe. Abba Alcott wept “convulsively,” but Lidian, as was her way, didn’t shed a tear.117 As Waldo’s ship disappeared over the horizon, Lidian and Henry returned to Concord to take up housekeeping together. Thoreau the hermit was history. Never again would Henry live alone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Writer’s Life (1847–1849)

  But how can I communicate with the gods who am a pencil-maker on the earth, and not be insane?

  Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

  “Will you be my father?”: Thoreau at the Emersons’

  Although Thoreau later wondered why he had been so willing to leave Walden, in a sense he never did leave. Walden stayed with him for the rest of his life, anchoring his reborn sense of self—independent, solitary even in the midst of crowds, grounded in the splash and spring of bedrock nature. A few weeks after he moved back to town, Thoreau wrote proudly to the class of ’37 that he’d lived up to the defiant ideals of his Harvard commencement speech: “I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry. . . . My steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.”1 At Walden he’d met heaven. Now it was time to meet the challenges of earth, home and society—for if what he’d found at Walden was real, it would follow him everywhere, even here.

  Once again the little green writing desk stood in the “prophet’s chamber” at the head of the Emersons’ stairs. For the next ten months, from October 5, 1847 through July 30, 1848, Thoreau was not merely gardener and handyman but head of the household, responsible for a bustling community: Lidian and the three Emerson children—eight-year-old Ellen, six-year-old Edith, and three-year-old Edward (or Ellie, Edie, and Eddy, as they became in Henry’s letters)—plus Aunt Lucy Brown and the family’s live-in servants Abby and Almira Stevens.2 “It is a little like joining a community—this life—to such a hermit as I,” Thoreau admitted to Emerson, but this new experiment “was good for society, & I do not regret my transient—nor my permanent share in it.” Thoreau was in charge of the kitchen garden and the landscaping, which meant overseeing Emerson’s gardener, Hugh Whelan. He also kept track of Emerson’s complicated financial affairs, which required endless consultations, and he spent hours each day with the children.3

  Letters crossed the Atlantic, chock full of news and adventures. “Lidian and I make very good housekeepers,” Thoreau reassured Emerson; “she is a very dear sister to me—Ellen & Edith & Eddy & Aunty Brown keep up the tragedy & comedy & tragi-comedy of life as usual.” While Ellen and Edith attended Anna Alcott’s day school at Hillside, Henry tutored little Eddy, who had taken to surveying the world from Henry’s shoulders, and, hinted Henry to father Waldo, he would know how to appreciate “any new and rare breed of wooden or pewter horses. . . . He very seriously asked me the other day—‘Mr Thoreau—will you be my father?’ I am occasionally Mr Rough-and-Tumble with him—that I may not miss him, and lest he should miss you too much.” Waldo was surprised and grateful: “Our Spartan-Buddhist Henry is a Père or bon-homme malgré lui,” he wrote Lidian. It was a daily comfort to think of Henry there with the family.4

  The town’s juiciest piece of gossip that fall was Sophia Foord’s marriage proposal to Henry Thoreau. “She really did wish to—I hesitate to write—marry me—that is the way they spell it,” he wrote Emerson. Of course he said no, he added hastily: “I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career.” Emerson blushed in reply: “You tell me in your letter one odious circumstance, which we will dismiss from remembrance henceforward.”5 Foord (who was forty-five, half ag
ain Thoreau’s age) had lived with the Alcotts before joining the Emersons as a tutor, and one of Thoreau’s jobs while living out at Walden was to come into town to remodel Emerson’s barn into her schoolroom and living quarters. Ill health forced Foord to resign after a year, but she left an impression: the children all liked her, recalled Ellen, and Louisa May Alcott remembered her leading the girls on a walk, disrobing and splashing along in Flint’s Pond, “making the fishes run like mad before our big claws, when we got to the other side we had a funny time getting on our shoes and unmentionables, and we came tumbling home all wet and muddy . . . bawling and singing like crazy folks.”6

  The free-spirited Foord did strike some as eccentric. Late in 1849, Aunt Maria was horrified at a rumor that she was suicidal on account of Henry, to whom she sent “incoherent” letters, which he burned after reading. Foord kept on teaching, kept in touch with the Alcotts, and kept an eye on the Thoreaus, too: in 1869, she startled Henry’s sister Sophia by approaching her at a meeting in Boston with the words “You don’t know me, Miss Thoreau.” After Foord’s death in 1885, Louisa paid tribute to her happy lessons, with “many a flower-hunt with Thoreau for our guide,” and to “her life-long desire for high thinking and holy living.”7 To the end, Foord insisted she was Thoreau’s soul mate, whose spirit would join his in the afterlife, where neither age nor Victorian proprieties of marriage could come between them.

  Another preoccupation that summer and fall was the building of Emerson’s summerhouse. After plans for a poet’s lodge on Emerson’s Cliff languished, Alcott found a way to spiritualize the summer day by cutting and weaving willow wands into a twiggy tent. Thoreau and Emerson liked it, and Emerson commissioned Alcott to build a grander version in his yard. In July 1847, they all rode out to Emerson’s Walden woodlot, cut down twenty young hemlocks, and carted them home for the house posts. Think of these trees, wrote Emerson, growing for so many years even as he was sleeping, “fenced, bought, & owned by other men,” now to grant him their share of sun and earth, rain and frost! Neither he nor Alcott mentioned how Thoreau had to catch a tree Alcott felled toward some neighboring trees, guiding it by main strength to land on open ground.8 Soon Alcott and Thoreau were laying the floor and raising the nine joists—one for each of the Muses, said Alcott. Instead of framing the house with timbers in the usual way, as Thoreau did at Walden, Alcott wove and lashed the whole together, branch by crooked branch, each one searched out and carried home by Thoreau. Emerson watched anxiously as it took shape, expecting the whole mess to collapse. “I think to call it Tumbledown-Hall,” he joked to Lidian; to Fuller he wrote that it was “of growing—alarming—dimensions—peristyle gables, dormer windows, &c in the midst of my cornfield.”9