Drinking Pond-Water with Thoreau (or some random thoughts on completing Walden)

 

Passing the time of day
with Henry

“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, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Chapter 2 of Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” by Henry David Thoreau

There. I did it. I just finished Walden or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. I was supposed to read portions of it in Mr. Bazan's class in high school back in the late 70s but quickly lost interest in it. Honestly, I think his style of writing and the long, often tedious reflections he inserts about all things life and the cosmos are way over the average high schooler's head – or least they were over my head. What's more, much like other 19^th Century American literature you better know your Bible in order to get the many references he makes to Scripture. Frankly, he lost me on his equally many citations of Hindu writings.

Am I supposed to feel enlightened upon completing this American classic? I think that people who are passionate about American literature or naturalists in general would hope that my worldview has remarkably expanded now that I have finished it but it seems to me the most I can say is that now I've read it. If it raises any eyebrows among that sophisticated crowd well and good but for the most part I'm not likely to pick it up and read it again any time soon.

It's not that it's so terrible. It's just that Thoreau is often so full of himself. He reminds me of a preacher who practices his sermon in an empty sanctuary on Saturday night imagining how he will wow his congregation come morning. Alone he is articulate and passionate and drives each point home with precision. But during the service the next day while people are yawning or dozing and little children are being minded his oratory that was so on point the night before falls like a dud. As a pastor myself, I know the feeling all too well. Alone you sound so authoritative but in the midst of the gathering you can't help but feel there's more than a few out in the pews who are about to say, “Spit it out, man! Get to the point!” Frequently while reading Walden I certainly felt this way.

“I feel it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companiable as solitude.” from Chapter 5 “Solitude”

Clearly, Thoreau was an introvert. Sure, he gave lectures but I know
plenty of pastors who are functioning “extroverts” that once the last person exits the building need a lot of down time to recover. This passage made me laugh as I am married to an introvert. People drain her and it's hard for her to participate in after-service chit-chat which is why she rarely does. It's not a bad-thing – really! But Thoreau's experiment of living simply in the woods drinking pond water and baking small loaves of brown bread on his fire or munching on huckleberries for dinner would only work for a single guy who prefers his own company. For a man with a wife it's simply not going to work (unless you're married to one of those Alaskan survivalists). When you're married and living in a 10' x 15' foot cabin (essentially a bit smaller than a tiny house) that's real romantic for a weekend. But for two years? Nah. Someone's either gonna walk out of the woods sometime early on in that experiment...or end up in a body bag. Add children into that equation and I'm thinking that about mid-way through his stay in Emerson's woods Thoreau would have busied himself with building another cabin – his man-cave – so once again he could enjoy the solitude he clearly craved.

An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affiairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. From Chapter 2 Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

It seems to me that his act of living in the woods was a protest against conformity to what he felt was the stifling “Christian” culture of mid-19^th Century New England much like hippies did in the late 60s and early 70s in the 20^th Century. If you can track his train of thought (he really meanders a lot) he goes to great lengths to critique society and government in general (there are some who believe he was an anarchist at heart). He came to the conclusion that if everyone lived as he did, many of the ills that plague society – greed, crime, covetousness, selfishness – would melt like the ice on Walden Pond in springtime.

I was never molested by any person but those who represented the state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected then if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this time, I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. From chapter 8 “The Village”

Frankly, methinks that idea is terribly naive. It assumes “buy-in” by a society where original sin is alive and well, another Utopian scheme to reform the world by bypassing the heart. Its doomed to fail.

Having said all this I did enjoy his reflections on the sounds and sights of living alone in the woods, the animals that came to call and the bird sounds that were his background music as he hoed his beans, baked his bread or fished the waters of the pond. Had I read his words in the dead of a northern Wisconsin winter, they would be like a summer's breeze blowing by my face tempting me to leave the busyness of my life and head to the Ice Age Trail to spend a day walking in silence. But I read them during an unusually dry June in the midst of a lot things going on which left me with a taste of resentment in my mouth for his seemingly carefree lifestyle. “Simplify?” Easy for you to say!

Here are some other notable quotations from his volume:

I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes a-foot. From Chapter 1 Economy

This is my new motto for my hiking days on the Ice Age Trail (IAT). I may only get 8 miles further down the IAT but will return with a sense of satisfaction of walking every foot of it and capturing copious moments with my camera, feeling that I have really experienced the trail instead of just getting through it.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. From Chapter 1 Economy

Who can argue with this little chestnut? It actually sorta sounds something Teddy Roosevelt might say – you know, his famous speech in Paris when he said that when attempting great endeavors it is better for a man to fail greatly for “at least [if] he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” While he and Thoreau came to very different conclusions about fixing the human race in this I think Teddy would have remarked, “Bully!”

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. From Chapter 3 Reading

Speaking as someone who loves and collects books myself I couldn't agree with him more. After all, at my fingertips at our home in Chetek I have access to the thoughts of those both living and dead. Many of the authors that I enjoy though dead they still speak to those of us who have an ear to listen.

Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than a heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? From Chapter 11 Higher Laws

I assume what he means by “nature” he means our baser human nature or what the Bible refers to as “the flesh”. We are prone to lust or covet or desire what is not ours. Speaking rhetorically the Apostle Paul asks the disciples in Rome, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:1-2, NIV). The fight for sanctification is real. Just when we think we're growing in Christ, we flip someone off in traffic or say something unkind to our spouse. I think Thoreau would advocate a certain sort of Stoicism to overcome “nature”. I much prefer the Apostle John's approach: “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9, NIV). So, don't make a habit of sin but if you do turn right to the Father and receive grace and mercy from him as you acknowledge your sin.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. From Conclusion

I suppose were he living today Thoreau would be comfortable with the phrase of “reinventing oneself” from time to time so that we are living, as he put back then, “deliberately.” I've been a pastor for most of my life now and its difficult to see myself doing anything else. I sincerely feel it is what I was born to do. But lately, now creeping up on thirty-two years of service to the same place and fellowship every now and again I imagine doing something different. What that is I have no idea but I won't deny the thoughts come with a bit of, er, excitement in my soul at the prospect of what the next chapter might look like, whenever I might get to that.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however, measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? From Conclusion

This, of course, is one of his more famous quotes. I certainly remember Mr. Bazan citing it way back then. In my teens, it sounded like an invitation to not be stifled by others' expectations of what you should do with your life. Now in my 60s, I find wisdom in it. Writing of Lake Wobegon, that fictious town on the edge of the plains that “time forgot and the decades cannot improve”, humorist Garrison Keillor remarked that the town's motto was “Sumus Quod Sumus” - We Are What We Are. Some people like myself are farmers. We are content to work the same plot of landscape through the decades of our life. Others are ranchers who are drawn to the open range and the wide open spaces over the horizon. A farmer can't be a rancher nor the other way round. Each has to march, as Thoreau would advocate, the beat of the drum he hears in his soul.

Once my copy of Walden returns to its place in my bookcase I'm not likely to pull it down anytime soon. But it is a pretty copy and I love the illustrations so my stay at Walden Pond was not for nothing. If the rabbits hadn't already got to them, this would be the right time to go hoe my beans.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. From Conclusion