It is widely acknowledged that, to craft a tidier narrative, Thoreau condensed his twenty-six months at the cabin into a single calendar year. But that is the least of the liberties he takes with the facts, and the most forgivable of his manipulations of our experience as readers. In reality, Walden Pond in was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters.
Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother and sisters who brought along more undocumented food and downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time.
It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man. Does this disingenuousness matter? Only someone who had never experienced true remoteness could mistake Walden for the wilderness or compare life on the bustling pond to that on the mid-nineteenth-century prairies. Real isolation presents real risks, both emotional and mortal, and, had Thoreau truly lived at a remove from other people, he might have valued them more.
Instead, his case against community rested on an ersatz experience of doing without it. Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions. Begin with falsified premises and you forfeit your authority. Apologists for Thoreau often claim that he merely distorted some trivial facts in the service of a deeper truth.
But how deep can a truth be—indeed, how true can it be—if it is not built from facts? Thoreau contends that he went to Walden to construct a life on the basis of ethical and existential first principles, and that what he achieved as a result was simple and worth emulating.
But Thoreau did not live as he described, and no ethical principle is emptier than one that does not apply to its author. The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company.
The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities. One answer is that we read him early. Moreover, he presents adulthood not as it is but as kids wishfully imagine it: an idyll of autonomy, unfettered by any civic or familial responsibilities.
Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches.
It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden. At one point, out in his boat, Thoreau paddles after a loon when it submerges, to try to be nearby when it resurfaces. Thoreau, too, emerges in a surprising place—in a game of checkers, where a lesser writer would have reached for hide-and-seek—and captures not only the behavior of the loon but a very human pleasure in being outdoors.
It is also in contemplating the land that Thoreau got the big picture right. But any reading of Thoreau that casts him as a champion of nature is guilty of cherry-picking his most admirable work while turning a blind eye on all the rest. The other and more damning answer to the question of why we admire him is not that we read him incompletely and inaccurately but that we read him exactly right.
It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero. One of America's most famous writers, Henry David Thoreau is remembered for his philosophical and naturalist writings. He was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, along with his older siblings John and Helen and younger sister Sophia.
His father operated a local pencil factory, and his mother rented out parts of the family's home to boarders. There he studied Greek and Latin as well as German. According to some reports, Thoreau had to take a break from his schooling for a time because of illness. He graduated from college in and struggled with what do to next. At the time, an educated man like Thoreau might pursue a career in law or medicine or in the church. Other college graduates went into education, a path he briefly followed.
With his brother John, he set up a school in The venture collapsed a few years later after John became ill. Thoreau then went to work for his father for a time. Through Emerson, he became exposed to Transcendentalism, a school of thought that emphasized the importance of empirical thinking and of spiritual matters over the physical world. It encouraged scientific inquiry and observation.
Thoreau came to know many of the movement's leading figures, including Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Emerson acted as a mentor to Thoreau and supported him in many ways. For a time, Thoreau lived with Emerson as a caretaker for his home.
Emerson also used his influence to promote Thoreau's literary efforts. Some of Thoreau's first works were published in The Dial , a Transcendentalist magazine. And Emerson gave Thoreau access to the lands that would inspire one of his greatest works.
Also that year, Thoreau proposed to a childhood friend of the family, Ellen Sewall, who refused on the advice of her father. Unfortunately, Thoreau's brother John, with whom he was quite close, died painfully from lockjaw in with Thoreau by his side.
From through , Thoreau lived with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson a fellow Transcendentalist and his family in Concord. While living there, he became quite fond of a summer boarder, named Mary Russell, who was a friend of Mrs. Thoreau once "noted that talking to her was 'like talking to the clouds'" Harding , Russell, like Sewall, also married another; however, Thoreau remained friends with both of their families.
With an apparent end to his romances, Thoreau went on to become a confirmed bachelor. Thoreau lived briefly in Staten Island, New York, in , where he served as a tutor to the children of William Emerson, Ralph's brother. Upon his return to Massachusetts, he looked for a quiet place to write. While living on Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote a book in memory of his brother John entitled, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , which reflected on a canoe trip they had taken in He spent many hours reading and writing, receiving visitors and exploring the landscape around Walden Pond.
In Thoreau's own words, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what I had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" Thoreau , Also during his time at Walden, in , Thoreau spent the night in jail for refusing to pay the poll tax that resulted in the writing of his essay Civil Disobedience.
He visited Maine, which he did again twice more in his life and later recounted these trips in an essay entitled The Maine Woods , published after his death. Upon leaving his cabin at Walden, Thoreau briefly lived with the Emerson family again while Ralph Waldo Emerson was away lecturing in England.
In , he returned to his family home where he resided for the remainder of his life. Thoreau, not a popular writer in his day, worked between the family pencil factory and land surveying to earn a living. He later delivered lectures about these experiences that were posthumously published in , simply entitled Cape Cod. Many of Thoreau's works were published after his death. Some of these include Summer , Winter , and Poems of Nature From until his death, Thoreau continued to travel the country visiting as far as Minnesota.
He wrote and lectured about his experiences and observations, including his essay Succession of Forest Trees He also became more involved in the abolitionist movement, serving as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and delivering lectures on such essays as Slavery in Massachusetts Thoreau died from tuberculosis on 6 May , at the age of forty-four.
Though Thoreau is viewed as a thinker of broad reach, perhaps his most significant contribution is the way his writings encapsulate environmental stewardship. He compressed all of that experience into one year for the book and used the four seasons of that year as a metaphor for human life. Thoreau had suffered from tuberculosis for much of his life but after being caught in a rainstorm examining the rings in a tree stump this turned to bronchitis and his health deteriorated.
He spent his remaining time editing his works, seeking new publishers and keeping his journal. Henry David Thoreau was an American author and philosopher famous for his observations of the natural world and his transcendentalist beliefs. People in Science.
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