GEORGIOS VAROUXAKIS THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817–62)

GEORGIOS VAROUXAKIS THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817–62)

US cultural icon, unsparing social critic, protoenvironmentalist and nature writer, Henry David Thoreau holds a key place in the traditions of US and world literature. Although considered primarily a man of letters, Thoreau contributed significantly to nineteenth- century political and social thought, as well as the natural history of New England and US Romantic religion. His writings also announced a new environmental ethic and inaugurated the tradition of US nature writing.

Thoreau was born in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts, 16 miles west of Boston, the old colonial capital. Like many other farming communities of the region, Concord would undergo rapid transformation during the middle decades of the nineteenth century as traditional agrarian patterns of life gave way to industrialization and a mixed manufacturing economy. Thoreau’s father, John, worked variously as a grocer and pencil-maker, while his mother, Cynthia, took in boarders to supplement the family income. Despite changing economic circumstances, however, throughout most of Thoreau’s life Concord remained a rural community surrounded by extensive tracts of pasturage, swamps and woodlands. Not far from the centre of town were several lakes, including Walden Pond itself, which Thoreau later celebrated for its pristine natural beauty.

At the age of 16, Thoreau matriculated at Harvard College. When he arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of 1833, Harvard was not the cosmopolitan seat of liberal learning it was to become later in the century, but a small, provincial, highly regimented academy whose curriculum still adhered to a classical programme of studies emphasizing rote learning and memorization. Instructors drilled their charges in a pre-set curriculum of Greek, Latin, history, English, maths and a modern language. Despite his love for the classics, Thoreau found the Harvard curriculum bleak and stultifying. His tutelage under Edward Tyrrel Channing, Harvard’s Professor of Rhetoric, did, however, yield some important dividends for his development as a writer. Thoreau also took advantage of his time at college to extend his knowledge of foreign languages beyond the required course format: to his mastery of Greek and Latin, he added a competency in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Later on in life, he even undertook the study of Algonquian dialects. Language, indeed, was an object of perpetual fascination to him, evident later, throughout his published writings, in his flair for etymological puns and wordplay, as well as in his more sustained inquiries into the natural origins of words.

On his return to Concord after his graduation in the autumn of 1837, Thoreau became better acquainted with RALPH WALDO EMERSON, a neighbour and sometime

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Harvard tutor who had delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address at the Harvard commencement earlier that summer. The previous year Emerson had published his first book, a little volume entitled Nature, which quickly acquired the status of a manifesto for the new movement of young Unitarian reformers from the greater Boston area who would come to be known as Transcendentalists. Ostensibly a philosophical meditation on nature, Emerson’s book actually offered to its readers a radical new philosophical, religious and literary vision that tended to subvert the primacy of received tradition, the Christian Bible and the authority of revealed religion. Despite its New England trappings, Nature also served its US readers as an important early conduit for the ideas and values associated with European Romanticism; indeed, the Transcendentalist movement that Emerson helped to foster represented the first wholesale expression of Romantic ideology in the USA. Apparently, Nature found a warmly sympathetic reader in Thoreau, as it did many young Unitarians of his generation, and he discovered in Emerson a literary mentor and model of enormous appeal. The friendship that grew from this early acquaintance, despite a difference in age of 14 years, became the most formative of the two men’s respective careers. Henceforth Thoreau also came to conceive his own writing as an expression of the new Transcendentalist ethos.

From the time of his Harvard graduation in 1837 till his early death from tuberculosis in 1862, Thoreau supported himself through an assortment of odd jobs, most notably surveying, carpentry and running his father’s pencil-making business. At the same time,

he made it a point of honour not to work at such jobs more than a portion of each day or year, in order to save himself for his literary labours and the more exacting contemplative experience of his daily excursions in the countryside around Concord. In the spring of 1845, Thoreau borrowed an axe and set about building a small house on the shores of Walden Pond where he lived in semi-seclusion for over two years, free of the domestic cares of the town, in order, as he wrote, ‘to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles’. Thoreau conceived this episode in his life in part as an economic experiment—how to make do with less—and in part as a demonstration of the practical and spiritual benefits of simplicity in life. Out of this experience emerged Thoreau’s most famous book, Walden, which he worked on almost continuously for the better part of ten years. To keep track of his daily and seasonal observations in nature, Thoreau also kept a journal, which by the end of his life amounted to a record of some two million words. This voluminous record might well be termed his master-work since it not only served as the principal repository for material used in the composition of his various books, lectures and essays, but it also constituted a massive literary enterprise in its own right. As this devotion to journal-keeping indicates, however various his outward modes of employment, Thoreau considered himself first and foremost a writer. His literary reputation rests principally on the two books published in his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and, more famously, Walden (1854), a work eventually welcomed into the company of world classics. In addition, Thoreau produced several other works published in book form posthumously, notably Maine Woods (1864) and Cape Cod (1865), as well as a host of occasional essays and poems. Among his several political essays, the most influential has been ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, popularly known as ‘Civil Disobedience,’ first published in 1849.

To characterize Thoreau as a Transcendentalist serves as a useful preliminary designation if only because it correctly situates his thought in the larger context of

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nineteenth-century Romanticism. Like other Transcendentalists, Thoreau generally found himself most at home in the intellectual company of philosophical idealists, beginning with Plato and the Neoplatonists, rather than philosophers of the rationalist school; he thought that intuition and the human imagination provided a more direct access to truth than the rational understanding; he conceived nature itself as the perfect embodiment and expression of spiritual reality, far exceeding any humanly mediated scriptures or revelations; he believed in what Emerson called the infinitude of the private man, that divinity dwells in the human heart, and that the individual conscience, not the dictates of the state or the impulses of the mob, was the final arbiter of the moral law; he was convinced that great art was the spontaneous free expression of the artist’s natural inspiration and genius, and not the result of a slavish conformity to artificial aesthetic conventions or criteria; and he held that nature’s own organic process and forms provided the best models for artistic creation. At the same time, even more than for some of his like-minded Transcendentalist friends, Thoreau’s thought resists easy categorization. He was not a systematic thinker, and efforts to pin him down to a few philosophical rubrics are bound to distort the dynamic nature of his thinking and the rhetorical character of his most representative writing.

Any assessment of Thoreau’s political and social thought must reckon first of all with his fierce individualism. He was not the misanthrope he has sometimes been made out to be—in fact he was a devoted friend and trusted neighbour—but he was temperamentally suspicious of organizations and commonly avoided humanitarian societies, churches and social reform movements of all kinds. Consequently, it is not surprising that much of his thinking about politics and society took the form of social criticism, and in this he could

be both stinging and censorious. The famous opening chapter of Walden, for example, consists essentially of a thoroughgoing critique of the norms and mores of rural New England life. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ he famously pontificated; they have become the tools of their tools, the slaves of their possessions. His contemporaries had gotten their lives upside down, misconstruing material means for life’s ultimate ends. Writing here like an indignant Hebrew prophet, Thoreau upbraided his Yankee neighbours for their thoughtless materialism and implored them to remake their lives according to a vision of life’s higher spiritual purpose. The situation, he insisted, required radical revaluation. But the solution was not to be found in humane societies or charitable associations. On the contrary, the reform of society must always begin with the reform of the individual. To Thoreau, reformers and philanthropists evoked particular scorn since dubious personal motives so often vitiated even their loftiest undertakings. Overtures to join this or that communal society of the day—Brook Farm and Fruitlands were notable examples—left him profoundly unmoved.

Thoreau’s habitual distrust of social reform movements extended to political structures as well. He begins his famous essay on civil disobedience polemically with this motto: ‘That government is best which governs least.’ Yet despite his suspicion of Government and politics, Thoreau was no anarchist: he firmly believed that Government had a constructive, if limited, role to play in enhancing the quality of human life. The problem was that, left to its own political and bureaucratic devices, Government was as likely to multiply human error as to mitigate it. Thoreau’s general attitude to the social and political upheavals of his time could thus be described as one of principled aloofness. There were, however, a couple of major exceptions to this usual policy of reserve. One

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came in response to US aggression against Mexico in 1846 when Thoreau famously chose to spend a night in jail rather than pay a tax levied to support the war. He used this episode to give dramatic form to his essay on nonviolent civil disobedience, which had such important repercussions in the thought of the modern freedom fighters Mohandas (‘Mahatma’) Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. In this essay, consistent with his faith in

a divinely sanctioned moral law, Thoreau appeals to a higher tribunal of human conscience to counteract the laws of a corrupt state. The institution of slavery in North America represented another set of evils that Thoreau was constitutionally unable to ignore. Nothing inspired more abhorrence in him than the slave trade, and few spoke out on the issue with more vehemence. Though he never formally joined any anti-slavery society, he agitated vigorously on behalf of abolitionism and served as a local agent in the Underground Railroad, helping smuggle run-away slaves through Concord on their way to Canada. Despite his rejection of violence earlier in life, the continuing horror of the slave trade forced him to conclude that forcible resistance might sometimes be necessary. His controversial defence of John Brown after the unsuccessful raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 represents the height of his political radicalism and presages his later support of northern military action in the Civil War.

Thoreau’s attitudes to organized religion were hardly less critical than his attitudes to politics and society, and in certain respects much more so. To the charges of corruption and greed that he sometimes levelled at unjust Government, he added arrogance and hypocrisy in the case of religion. He had little good to say about the clergy, even though

he counted some clergymen as his friends, or about institutional worship, or about religious dogma and creeds, or about pious expressions of faith, because all of these seemed inauthentic to him. On the other hand, Thoreau expressed passionate support for the ideals of religious life and the sources of religious inspiration, particularly the ethical teachings and prophetic traditions of the Christian Bible. He also found important inspiration in the scriptures, mythologies and wisdom traditions of several other religions, in particular the classical texts of India and China. What complicates matters here is that, by nature and temperament, Thoreau was himself a deeply spiritual and devout individual; it was simply that the focus of his devotion had shifted from the Christian Church to the natural world outdoors. Thoreau’s own religious life may thus be characterized as committedly nonsectarian, anti-institutional, personal, nature-centred and, perhaps above all, experiential. Like the mystics and contemplatives of orthodox traditions, he sought divine contact at the level of direct experience and not at the level of faith alone.

The prevailing empiricist cast of Thoreau’s religious thought clearly shaped his attitudes to nature as well and favoured his interest in natural science. Despite his admiration for the cultivated Emerson, Thoreau was never entirely comfortable with the sort of armchair philosophizing his friend sometimes practised nor the easy generalizations to which he sometimes subjected the natural world. For Thoreau nature was not just a ‘symboF of the spiritual world, as Emerson had conceived of it in Nature, but the very substance and life of reality itself. To understand nature properly one had to approach the natural world on its own terms and be prepared to forgo all of one’s prior assumptions. Consistent with this belief, Thoreau spent long hours of each day observing natural forms and phenomena in the countryside around his home, and meticulously recording his findings in his journals. In doing so, he contributed importantly to the

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growing body of knowledge about the natural history of Massachusetts. Additionally, Thoreau’s published writings provided the first compelling formulation of an environmentalist ethic in the USA, and served as the foundation for the subsequent tradition of US nature writing. Yet, despite his keen interest in natural science, Thoreau also considered the scientific method somewhat limited, its results often barren of essential human meaning. The facts of nature only acquired their true significance, he believed, when brought into relationship with the human mind. Thoreau’s mature treatment of nature thus fused the Transcendentalist Idealism exemplified by Emerson with an empiricism shaped by his own contemplative experience and precise field observations.