The adventures of Henry Thoreau : a young man's unlikely path to Walden Pond

267 Pages·2014·1.79 MB·English

by  Sims

Every child begins the world again.. . .
Henry David Thoreau

To my son, Vance,
a gift and marvel,
who raced this book and beat it to the finish line.
I loved to hear him talk, but I did not like his books so well, though I often read them and took what I
liked.
They do not do him justice. I liked to see Thoreau rather in his life.
Maria Bridge Pratt (Mrs. Minot Pratt), a Concord neighbor Perhaps he fell, all of us do, into his
way of living, without forecasting it much, but approved & confirmed it with later wisdom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer
—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-
paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.
Henry David Thoreau
CONTENTS
Overture

Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Part 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15

Part 3
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Coda

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
By the Same Author
Overture
DANCING ON THE ICE

When I found a young Henry Thoreau ice-skating through the correspondence of
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, it was like running into a long-lost friend. In the
decades since first encountering Walden in my late teens, I had often glimpsed
Thoreau as the bearded sage of literature, natural history, or civil liberties.
Except in his own writings, however, I had seldom met the awkward young man
who loved to sing, who ran a private school and applied his engineering skills to
the pencil business, who popped popcorn and performed magic tricks for Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s children, faced his own illnesses and the deaths of loved ones,
and tried to make it as a freelance writer in New York City.
Sophia Hawthorne described a lively afternoon in Concord in December 1842
that captured my imagination: a twenty-five-year-old Thoreau skating on the
Concord River with both Emerson and Sophia’s own newlywed husband,
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Emerson skated earnestly and Hawthorne grandly.
Thoreau cavorted in what Sophia soon described to a friend as “dithyrambic
dances and Bacchic leaps.” In ancient Greece a dithyramb was a wild choral
hymn and dance, especially one dedicated to Bacchus. Thoreau didn’t drink
alcohol, but otherwise Sophia Hawthorne found the perfect term for his response
to being outdoors, which was indeed ecstatic and pagan.
Thoreau was not an ivory-tower thinker sitting with chin in hand. Contrary to
myth, he was not a hermit. Caught up with his friends and his era, he lived most
of his life in a busy village and admitted that he considered “homeopathic doses”
of local gossip “as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of
frogs.” He spent relatively little time in the wilderness—a few weeks here and
there. His Walden Pond cabin provided a solitary working space away from his
family’s boardinghouse, not escape from all society.
Over the years, I found that some books about Thoreau sharpened rather than
assuaged my hunger for more about the real-life young man. As I began writing
my own book about him, I realized that I didn’t want to admire the marble bust
of an icon. I wanted to gambol with a sarcastic radical who could translate
Pindar and Goethe, track a fox to its lair, and host an abolitionist rally beside a
tiny cabin he had built himself. I didn’t want to applaud Thoreau. I wanted to
find Henry.

We all have our own Thoreau. I met mine in high school, where he told me that
we are rich in proportion to how much we can do without, that the cost of
something is how much of our brief time on earth must be exchanged for it. I
had no trouble fitting a mental image of Thoreau’s 1840s Massachusetts over my
1970s Tennessee and his famous Concord lake over my modest woodland pond.
“Aim above morality,” this mentor advised, pulling the rug out from under both
my fundamentalist upbringing and years of school indoctrination. What I loved
most, however, were his observations about nature. His was a new kind of voice
in the mid-nineteenth century: a strong mind classically trained, a poetic
sensibility steeped in literature and allusion, but also an outdoorsman’s
viewpoint informed by a growing passion for how nature actually works. His
studies were anchored by personal experience—decades of watching passenger
pigeons and woodchucks, carrying botanical specimens in his hat, and observing
spawning fish until he could gently lower his hand into the water and lift one
out.
Other people have a different Thoreau, just as we have different Malcolm Xs,
Oscar Wildes, and Virginia Woolfs. “Today Thoreau’s words are quoted with
feeling,”1 wrote Thoreau aficionado Ken Kifer, “by liberals, socialists,
anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.” His worldwide reputation as a
philosopher and political activist can be traced to several lectures and essays,
especially those following his now-famous night in jail—topics that appear later
in this book and in its coda. Both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King
credited Thoreau with inspiring their nonviolent campaigns. Edward O. Wilson
called Thoreau “the father of environmentalism” and insisted that “he also
deserves iconic status in the scientific fields of ecology and biodiversity studies.”
Fifteen years after Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson told a friend, “Thoreau was a
superior genius. . . .2 A man of large reading, of quick perception, of great
practical courage and ability,—who grew greater every day, and, had his short
life been prolonged would have found few equals to the power and wealth of his
mind.”

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau begins in his childhood and ends in his late
twenties. To resurrect this odd young man’s everyday life, I turned to his
nineteenth-century contemporaries. Thanks largely to the support of fellow
Concord villager Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau spent his adulthood
surrounded by many of the great writers of the period we now call the American
Renaissance. Several neighbors wrote memoirs or biographies of him, such as
Emerson, Ellery Channing, and Franklin Sanborn. Others observed Thoreau
closely in journals and correspondence, including all of these plus Nathaniel and
Sophia Hawthorne, Lidian Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller.
I found many other rich primary sources. Only hours after some incidents took
place in the school run by Thoreau and his brother, for example, the students
involved described them in diaries or in letters to their parents. After Thoreau
became famous for his own writings, some former students penned sketches of
him, filled with vivid anecdotes, as did a few of his fellow Harvard
undergraduates. Many other Concordians documented everyday life in this
tumultuous era. Through them I was able to conjure many surprising details—
the prevalence of drunkenness in the town, for example, or the look and feel of a
Sunday morning at the Unitarian church.
All dialogue, all thoughts and observations attributed to any character, derive
from written records by participants, as you can see from the endnotes. I employ
terms that Thoreau used in his own writing, such as Man for humanity, Negro
for African American, and Indian for Native American. For many proper nouns I
followed nineteenth-century spelling, such as Ktaadn for the mountain now
spelled Katahdin.
Every historical or biographical narrative slants toward those topics and
characters that most intrigue the author, shaped by which incidents are included
and which omitted. I’m more interested in Thoreau’s imaginative response to
nature, for example, than in his role as social critic and moral gadfly, and
consequently much of this book takes place outdoors. It also begins before he
put away his rifle. Thoreau started in his boyhood as a hunter and later
occasionally shot birds for sport or to study them more closely. His constant
reexamination of his own values changed his relationship with both society and
nature.
Beginning with a Romantic and Transcendental view of natural processes as
symbolic, Thoreau grew increasingly committed to a scientific view of nature.
At the cabin, after a morning spent reading Anacreon or Chateaubriand,
afternoon might find him undertaking a statistical analysis of temperature
changes in regional bodies of water. He studied ecology twenty years before the
German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel coined the term Oekologie. “This world,”
Thoreau wrote as he immersed himself ever more in the natural sciences, “is not
a place for him who does not discover its laws.” Later he was quick to see the
validity of Darwin’s discoveries about how nature changes slowly over time.
During his brief period living at Walden Pond, such careful attention to nature
inspired and nurtured the best writing Thoreau had yet done, the seeds of the
best he would ever do. There he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, and began what would become his best and most famous,
Walden. My own book moves toward and culminates in this turning point, as a
quirky but talented young man named Henry evolves into an original and
insightful writer named Thoreau.