"Walden" by Henry David Thoreau (published 1854)

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau

As it turns out, Henry David Thoreau, considered by many to be a quintessential American writer, is not as quaint as I may have originally believed. My initial impression of Thoreau was just that – an initial impression - which did not keep me from reading one of his most famous works, “Walden”, even when I came across his more personally disagreeable ideals. The best places to go are places where one does not have to purchase any new clothes, he writes, or the idea that one should maximize (if you will) the concept of minimalism itself. I love clothes as a form of expression as do I love objects (particularly related to artistry), so his ideas seemed *quaint* to me.

However, as I started to really contemplate Thoreau’s “Walden”, it became clear that Thoreau actually set a great example in that he came at the world, and the people and animals and nature he came into contact with, in the most nonjudgmental way. His opinions were shared only for the sake of honesty. All the while Thoreau encouraged a philosophy that urged us to adventure into the direction of our dreams – whatever that dream may be - “for the world and men within it will become all the more universal and liberal because of it.” How refreshing then, to think about a man who came to sit by Walden Pond in the state of Massachusetts, within this little bit of nature right outside of a busy town in the United States of America.

Still, “Walden”, published in August of 1854, must be just a little bit quaint then, given the time that has passed since it has been written: one hundred and sixty-four years. Yet, the sheer magnitude of what Thoreau did and what he wrote about surpasses that particular criticism:

“It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them… for the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. By the words *necessary of life*, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.”

Thoreau makes sure to inform us that reading, writing, and books themselves are not excluded from the necessary (“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!”). He frets that the modern world now has teachers of philosophy, but no philosophers. He frets that most men only know the Hebrew Bible, and none other. He quotes the Sheiks, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Greeks. Thoreau is a worldly man searching for another world, the Earth.

Next to Walden Pond, Thoreau spent time building his own cottage before he settled into it. Every step he did himself. He chopped the wood and put the entire thing together. Once his home in the woods was built, he made friends with the animals. Mice, too. He befriended one mouse, a “wild” mouse he says, and the mouse became his dinner companion for a time. The ducks and geese, the birds, all these became his companions. Many times I have read stories regarding the “humanizing” of animals, but this time the idea really struck me. The way Thoreau writes about these animals makes the animals the civilized ones, and us, the humans, the savages. He never says that, it is just something I took away. The glimmer of a fish becomes majestic. A bird preening is a precious moment. The wild call of a creature becomes a message to God/the Gods, asking for a thunderous storm of renewal. Thoreau sits and observes, swims (“bathes”), listens, writes. He discovers new meaning for each season. Spring forgives every man’s sins.

On Solitude, he writes:

“…I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness.”

To those who asked if he might be lonely, all alone in the woods, he replied:

“…this whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way? This which you put seems to me not to be the most important question. What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?”

Thoreau became so acquainted with Nature that he realizes that humanity only knows nature as a robber. A robber of its soil, especially, of its soil as property. Perhaps Thoreau’s great work reminds us to regard the Earth as a living thing – not dead – not just fossils – but something very much alive that we can interact with on a grand scale. An earth cultivated. That was his dream for himself and he followed it to its end. He came away knowing something so massive in scale; an acknowledgement made in “Walden” that surpasses all words, his, and all others.