Beyond Walden Pond
Illusion & Reality in Pursuit of the Simple Life
by A. J. Conyers
“Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
—A. N. Whitehead
A student stopped me briefly in the library for some friendly banter about the length of a reading assignment. (No, he was not complaining that it was too short.) Suddenly his gaze lifted just above my shoulder and focused on a small, inscribed marble rectangle in a garden, just on the other side of the window. “I couldn’t help noticing as we talked,” he said smiling, “the words of Thoreau.” Then, as if he had just found a bit of holy Scripture to refute his professor’s error of a lengthy assignment, he quoted: “Books should be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written.” I was trumped by an American prophet, or so it seemed.
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods is, after all, an American classic on the simple life, if we mean by “classic” a work that permeates and, in an important way, speaks for a particular culture. Its words have appeared, like the words of Scripture, everywhere: mounted on office walls, magnetized to kitchen refrigerators, stitched into needlework designs, and carved into granite monuments throughout this country. Yet, for all of Thoreau’s moral authority, the demons of materialism in America have never been exorcised. Madly pursuing the very opposite of simplicity, we appear to prefer Thoreau in little condensed versions on our coffee tables, so that in the midst of the rush and complication of life we can think of how it might have been, or indeed how it might yet be sometime. We want to think about the woods, maybe, but we don’t want to live there.
The Not-So-Simple Thoreau
Has American culture, after long practice and mature wisdom, abandoned the counsel of simplicity, yet maintained a certain nostalgic attachment to it? Or do Americans simply find the world inevitably too complex to practice an art of simplicity that more naturally belongs to another age? Or are there contradictions within Thoreau’s own idea of the simple life that so oppose nature, including human nature, that it inevitably ends with practical contradictions in any age?
Part of the answer may well lie in the story of Henry David Thoreau himself. His life, at least in its surface features, is well known. He was born and he died in Concord, Massachusetts, his life spanning the middle part of the nineteenth century (1817–1862). Though his family moved briefly from Concord, and he was educated at Harvard, the events of his life centered around the small New England village and its soon-to-be illustrious residents and its literary visitors.
Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in Concord; and if Thoreau had a friend, Emerson was that friend. Bronson Alcott lived there; so did Ellery Channing. Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker were frequent visitors. Here in Concord is where the Transcendentalist Club was formed, soon to have a reputation not usually visited on a small nineteenth-century salon in what was still a relatively pastoral setting. The Dial, one of the most famous “little” magazines in history, was published there only from 1840 to 1844, its pages carrying some of Thoreau’s best known and most highly acclaimed essays. Nathaniel Hawthorne knew Thoreau, as he did others in this Concord literary circle, and described him in a letter to a certain Mr. Epes Sargent as “a graduate of Cambridge, and a fine scholar, especially in old English literature, but withal a wild, irregular, Indian-like sort of fellow, who can find no occupation in life that suits him” (Emerson, Thoreau and Concord in Early Newspapers, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron [Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1958], p. 148).
We frequently get the picture, touched upon by Hawthorne, that Thoreau was no mere amiable eccentric. There were deep streams of conviction that his acquaintances noted, but they sometimes felt more forbidding than inviting. A certain uneasiness with the world, and even with his own human nature, was apparent. Joseph Hosmer, a contemporary of Thoreau’s, wrote that Thoreau was “the embodiment of sincerity and truth,” but Hosmer was evidently puzzled and perhaps even troubled by Thoreau’s remark that it was “annoying . . . to be obliged to eat two meals per day to preserve one’s health, and what a relief it would be to the race if one meal a week would suffice, but as it is, he is a slave to his body.” Thoreau never attended church (“with one or two exceptions,” Hosmer explains) and was of the opinion that no one could pray for him “any more than another could eat his dinner for him.” Hosmer also commented, “He appeared indifferent to all about him, and sometimes I thought he ‘hated’ himself.” This is the first, but not the last time, the idea of “self-hatred” comes up in reflections on Thoreau.
A. J. Conyers (d. 2004) was Professor of Theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas, and the author of several books, including The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit (Spence, 2001).
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