The Revolutionary David Thoreau

 

What most people know about Henry David Thoreau comes down to this:
 
In 1845, he retreated from civilized life for two years and two months and “lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor… on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.” He was in his late twenties. The land was owned by his benefactor, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. Several years after the experiment ended, he published a version of the journals he kept during this time. The book was called Walden.
 
People might also know that he did not, in fact, spend the entire year alone and that he had some occasional help sustaining himself. His mother, for example, did his laundry.
 
“Walden” has entered the American English vocabulary as a synonym either for voluntary isolation, self-sufficiency, and harmonious co-existence with Nature, or for hypocrisy and entitlement, depending upon whom you ask, but the popular use of the word has less to do with the book than is generally assumed. Of course, it is the record of voluntary isolation and relative self-sufficiency, but Thoreau also has much to say about things that are decidedly not a part of the nineteenth-century pastoral imagination.
 
Although it is a narrative of withdrawal, Walden is better understood as a reflection on industrial progress and how an individual inhabits a society increasingly defined by its economic relations. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Thoreau was observing the ever-more complex entanglements of modern life even as he tried to imagine a way out. His later, more explicitly political writings have their origins in the thinking worked out in his account of his social seclusion.
 
His answer to the question of how to live in a world that demands unacceptable moral compromises and how a citizen should resist systemic oppression was decided, in large part, by the experiment in living that is Walden. And so, exhibiting all of the virtues and all of the problems of American liberalism, Thoreau came to encapsulate their central contradiction in this desire to solve structural social and economic problems through heroic individualism and moral rigor.
 
*
 
When it became clear, back in March, that our habitual patterns of production and consumption would be severely constrained and that those of us with the means to do so would be spending a lot of time in our homes, many people started casting about for texts that might explain, or at least describe in even approximate terms, the physical, psychological, and political terrain of a quarantine. Among the myriad references to apocalypse movies and plague novels, Walden, too, began to appear in editorials and social media posts as a way to brighten the long stretch of isolation that lay ahead of us. These invocations were generally insipid, but Walden might not be as irrelevant as these self-help style citations made it seem. It certainly isn’t as sunny. Given that “Walden” is popularly reduced to the biographical conditions of its writing, it might also be noted that Thoreau may still have been in mourning when he embarked on his woodland adventure. His brother John had died, suddenly, of tetanus in 1842.
 
Thoreau understood that he was not so geographically remote. He received visitors (there is a chapter called “Visitors”) and took trips to the nearby village (there is also a chapter called “The Village”). He was, of course, interested in living off of the land and having a regular and intimate relationship with Nature. But he was equally interested in what he was leaving behind: the “fool’s life” of perpetual debt, in which men have “no time to be anything but a machine.” This other existence—this place where “a stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements”—is an indispensable, if negative, narrative and philosophical presence in the woods. Walden is not a summary rejection of quotidian reality: reminders of human society and industry do not violently intrude upon the landscape but comfortably inhabit the margins of his vision: “I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other.”
 
The reason, perhaps, that Thoreau is not put off by the proximity of trains and farms is that he was not seeking solitude for solitude’s sake. He was attempting to extract himself from a society that he found deeply troubling. Thoreau does not begin his record of life alone with the naturalist observations that we have come to associate with him (and at which he excelled). Instead, Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.” Thoreau’s aversion to the rapid technological changes brought about by industrialization did not issue from a Romantic attachment to unspoiled Nature. In fact, he quite likes the sound of the trains, or is, at the very least, resigned to their permanent integration into the landscape. In the chapter on “Sounds,” he describes train whistles as well as birdcalls. “I watch,” he writes “the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun.”
 
Nature, for Thoreau, was never an abstract or idealized entity. It was concrete, material, specific. In its nineteenth-century manifestation, therefore, it always appears circumscribed by culture, and this seems to have been acceptable, not objectionable, to the author. What mattered was not his literal, physical distance from civilization or the purity of the landscape. What Thoreau wanted was a spiritual or philosophical distance from society—and the retreat to Walden facilitated a modicum of non-participation.
 
Generations of critics and readers have chosen to emphasize the spiritual communion with Nature described by Thoreau and, of course, this was important to him. But we would do better to shift our attention to what Thoreau was withdrawing from. In this alternate light, one senses that Nature’s value lies primarily in this contrast to the social world—that its true value to him is as a means of retreat. Read in this way, Walden is not primarily a record of the so-called “natural” world but a social commentary.
 
There are, to be sure, birdcalls as well as disquisitions on the pointlessness of telegraphs, but the beginning of Walden is taken up with an all-too-familiar, particularly modern form of discomfort that we have, a hundred and fifty years on, learned to live with but have yet to fully dispel: the knowledge that we are trapped in a social and economic system that was not of our making, that we have in no real way chosen to inhabit, and that we cannot hope to escape from. Or, put another way, a system that we often fantasize about quitting for good. This is, I suspect, the appeal of apocalypse narratives—wishes disguised as fears. It is also a more plausible or at least interesting explanation for the perennial return to Walden. The idea of our own private Walden is less a desire to be “in nature” than a desperate longing to get out of this awful place. We don’t want to live serenely by a pond rather than a city park so much as we want to stop contributing to a system that requires others suffer so that we might enjoy what we suspect are merely compensatory amusements.
 
*
 

Thoreau delivered his famous essay Resistance to Civil Government as a lyceum lecture in January of 1848. It was published roughly a year later. The title by which it is most often referred to, “Civil Disobedience,” was bestowed by Thoreau’s sister Sophia, who also oversaw the publication of a posthumous 1866 edition of his reform papers and anti-slavery writings. Given the current use of the word “civil,” the 1866 title is slightly misleading. The main argument advanced in Resistance was that a person had not only a right but also a moral obligation to flout the authority of an unjust government. This resistance may have been passive, in the sense that Thoreau did not advocate armed rebellion—though he came close to doing so—but it was not simply the nonviolent protest of our understanding. He went further than suggesting that a citizen should disobey unjust laws. The very legitimacy and authority of civil government as a whole was at issue here. Thoreau did not, he announced, recognize the United States government as fit to govern him. For, in 1848, the United States was a country where, by Thoreau’s estimate, four million people were held as slaves.
 
Resistance begins with uninspiring libertarian boilerplate; its opening passages are cantankerous and suspect in their invocation of individual moral agency. But the argument Thoreau develops becomes both more satisfying and more challenging. He was not adopting a conventional “small government” position. He differentiates himself from “those who call themselves no-government men.” What he wants, and what he wants his fellow abolitionists to demand, is “at once a better government.” It is not government in general that fails to command legitimacy but unjust government, and a government that legally sanctions slavery is rotten at its core:
 
     ‘’If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction.’
 
Slavery, by contrast, is a machine designed wholly for the production of “friction.” This makes any strategic, limited refusal to participate impossible. Most citizens, he argued, were simply bodies in the service of this machine whose main function seemed to be the expansion of slavery. “There are thousands,” he writes, “who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war [in Mexico], who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them.” In fact, most people do much worse than nothing: they actively “postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade… They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition,” but they are too invested in the notion of reform through a legal structure that is broken and, more to the point, too deeply invested in a slave economy, to do anything about it. Living in the North or even belonging to abolitionist societies did not exonerate one:
 
     ‘’Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico cost what it may.’
 
The “the question of freedom and the question of free trade” and the abdication of freedom for the false freedom of social “progress” were fundamental and pervasive social problems that found their most reprehensible expression in support for slavery and imperial expansion.
 
This was why Walden was important. Progress required that citizens yoke themselves to an immoral economy in ever more complex ways. Progress could enlist well-meaning people in any number of unethical enterprises by the subtle blandishments of daily practices and basic comforts. Thoreau, however, does not believe that we can have our cake and eat it too. The more dependent we are on the fruits of economic progress the less likely we are to think, let alone act, against the political and moral system that such an economy has created.
 
This stakes out what would become an unpopular position—involving too much emphasis on lifestyle for the marxisant left and too little room for redemption for liberals seeking to rehabilitate capitalism. But I don’t think Thoreau’s point can be so easily dismissed. Ideology, after all, is not a system of beliefs but a set of practices. It is not politics but the daily, barely noticeable, conditions that make a certain set of beliefs about the world possible. Walden implicitly recognized this.
 
Thoreau’s more explicitly political writings inherit the insights produced at Walden; they are of a piece with them. And along with these insights, these works instantiate an irresolvable tension between Thoreau’s quasi-sociological worldview and his transcendentalist preoccupation with the individual. In 1849, he wrote in his journal that he “learned this by my experiments in the woods, of more value perhaps than all the rest—that if one will advance confidently in the direction of his dreams… he shall walk securely, perfect success will attend him.” Thoreau believed that an escape from the system was possible if only we would exercise sufficient moral and intellectual rigor.
 
*
 
So what is to be done? It is all well and good to suggest that white men of means might get their head on straight by taking a principled vacation from the snares of consumption, but placing the real burden of social change on an individual—locating the mechanism of structural reforms in individual attitudes or even individual actions—is at best problematic and at worst dangerous. The demands made of individual men by the argument in Resistance verge on absurd. This is not because Thoreau could not account for power but because of where he located it. He sincerely believed, in a manner that was transparently Christian and messianic, that purity of belief and access to higher laws would allow a man to become, in his formulation, “a majority of one.”
 
Setting aside the obvious critique of the radical independence and individualism championed by the transcendentalists—that it structurally excludes, women, African Americans, the poor, and anyone else in a subordinate position—heroism as social solution doesn’t bear much scrutiny. If the machine “requires you to be the agent of injustice,” Thoreau writes, then you must “let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” It is paramount “that [one doesn’t] lend [themselves] to the wrong which [they] condemn.” For anyone with a conscience, this is a familiar fantasy, but it is difficult to see how it might be fulfilled by anything short of one’s civic or physical annihilation. How else could anyone take themselves out?

Enter John Brown.
 
In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown and twenty-two followers raided a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. This was supposed to be the first act in a general revolt against slavery across the South, but Brown and his small band were easily defeated by a contingent of US Marines. Brown was swiftly sentenced to death. Within a week of the raid, Thoreau announced that he would be giving a lecture in Brown’s defense. When Thoreau’s fellow abolitionists advised him that this was premature and ill-considered, he responded that he had not sent for advice but simply to announce that he would be speaking. In Brown’s “peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave,” Thoreau recognized the “majority of one” that seemed lacking in polite society.
 
Thoreau should be commended for his principled position in the face of a hypocritical pacifism that refused to recognize what we might today call “structural violence”—in A Plea for Captain John Brown, Thoreau pointed out that “we preserve the so called ‘peace’ of our community by deeds of petty violence every day.” But Brown, though seen by many as “on the right side of history,” is a problematic character. The logic of his willingness to use personal violence to oppose structural violence led him to some dark places. In 1856, during the guerrilla fighting of the pre-Civil War conflict known as “Bloody Kansas,” Brown led what has become known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. Along with four of his sons, a son-in-law, and two other followers, Brown descended on a small pro-slavery settlement in Kansas and murdered and mutilated five men. And Brown’s certitude about the rightness of his actions was underwritten by a fanatical religious faith: as with the raid on Harper’s Ferry, these killings were decreed by Almighty God.
 

Though Thoreau chose to defend it, Brown’s armed insurrection was by no means the only form of resistance to slave power in the 1850s: the country saw real and effective collective action against slavery in many Northern and border states that went beyond genteel legal petitioning. In 1850, Congress had passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Missouri Compromise, a law that in effect demanded that citizens and governments of non-slave states actively participate in the capture and extradition of escaped slaves. Furthermore, the act stipulated that the national treasury was responsible for the entire cost of rendition, thus implicitly enlisting all taxpayers in the project of slavery. The reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law was widespread and intense; opposition to it ranged from legal challenges to its constitutionality in state courts to forcible resistance against slave-owners and slave catchers. Well-organized, armed vigilance committees were formed by free blacks with and without the assistance of white supporters.
 
These organizations, too, thus fulfilled Thoreau’s call to defy the law and they succeeded in preventing slave catchers from operating in certain towns and even entire counties. John Brown himself contributed to the formation of a number of these committees. But unlike the raid on Harpers Ferry, the work of these committees formed a larger, organized, and far more effective movement to check the extension of slave power—without requiring any single hero or individual figurehead.
 
*
In our own, present period of relative isolation, it did seem for several weeks as though something had shaken loose. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the scale and scope of the nationwide uprising against racist policing made a relationship between a Walden-like social dislocation and a new political radicalism seem plausible. The partial collapse of society’s business-as-usual has surely made even the more comfortable citizens think differently about its purported progress. And this, as Thoreau surmised, has had an effect on the willingness of citizens to take principled action against an unjust government.
 
We might also see, in the calls for defunding the police and prison abolition, something similar to his idea that gradualist, piecemeal reform is inadequate. And we can certainly see, in vandalized police stations, looted luxury stores, and toppled statues, an echo of Thoreau’s disdain for mere petitioning. But his championing of John Brown, dismissed as either insane or criminal by much of polite society, suggests a tension that was present in his work and in the development of his ideas. On the one hand, it showed how a distance from the day-to-day operations of economic progress can produce a salutary radicalism. On the other, it indicates the grave limitations of a political and philosophical investment in individual heroism—the danger inherent in the voluntarism of identifying political efficacy with moral purity and deeply held convictions.
 
Belief systems and abstract commitments are, of course, indispensable to social change. But when this isolated interiority becomes the sovereign justification for political action, there are only two possible conclusions: either a quietist withdrawal for endless self-reflection or a dangerous willingness to achieve political ends through violent means.
 
The desire to confront political problems with personal integrity runs deep, but the writer of both Walden and A Plea can only take us so far: for all the self-reflection and political conviction in the world, the individual conscience doesn’t necessarily translate into the collective action and the political demands needed to challenge an unjust system.
 
The Revolutionary David Thoreau. By  R.H. Lossin . The New York Review of Books.  September 4, 2020

Sic Vita
 
(“It is but thin soil where we stand; I have felt my roots in a richer ere this. I have seen a bunch of violets in a glass vase, tied loosely with a straw, which reminded me of myself”
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)
 
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
 
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A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.
 
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
 
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
 
 
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Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.
 
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
 
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
 
 
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American renaissance man - writer, naturalist, flower-lover, reformer, philosopher, land surveyor. Walden remains his most famous work, the account of his two years “in the woods” at Walden Pond, a lake in Concord, Massachusetts. He was profoundly influenced by the transcendentalist thinker and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, friend, mentor and owner of the land where he built his lakeside cabin.
 
Transcendentalism grew from English and German Romanticism, invigorating and broadening its ideals of human perfectibility. Thoreau’s poem, written in the early 1840s, reveals additional roots. The title abbreviates Sic vita est hominum – “man’s life is thus” – and refers to the eponymous poem by Henry King. King was a friend of John Donne and Ben Jonson and his graceful little praise song to flowers suggests another possible source. Thoreau’s reading clearly went back further than the celandines and daffodils of Wordsworth. He sets himself a challenge with Sic Vita, but works his way beyond what might risk being a young man’s narcissistic metaphysical pastiche, extending the “cut flowers” symbolism to an intense statement of his own truth.
 
The metaphor doesn’t arrive fully formed until the second stanza, although it’s hinted in some slightly off-key diction in the first. Persevere, and the speaker’s keenly felt dislocation finds its workable image. Theological concerns are secondary. Thoreau’s images are based on earthbound observation. The cut flowers are “arranged” in their vase with a certain aesthetic awareness, which only emphasises the artificiality imposed on them: “A bunch of violets without their roots, / And sorrel intermixed, / Encircled by a wisp of straw / Once coiled about their shoots.” The speaker’s turmoil and sense of pointless entrapment, focused by the first stanza, and poignantly returning in the fourth, suggest an uncomfortable prelude to self-discovery. Thoreau was to abandon poetry, and find less constrained forms of thought and existence. Sic Vita contains the blueprint of his development.
 
Although the note of personal pessimism returns in the last line of the poem, the ecologist has won the argument with the melancholy Romantic. He knows that the stock from which the violets were cut hasn’t been terminally damaged by the pruning, but strengthened. It’s a shift of perspective in the metaphorical narrative which sees that human interference in nature may be positive, or at least that to view it as inescapably negative would be sentimental. Scientific thinking becomes the poem’s saving grace, the practical transcendentalism that is the core of Thoreau’s genius.
 
He devoted serious thought to the definition of poetry. “No definition,” he wrote, “is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician’s. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.”

 Sic Vita has mysterious origins: it was apparently “written on a sheet of paper wrapped round a bunch of violets, tied loosely with a straw, and thrown into the window of a friend”. It was read at Thoreau’s funeral by his friend, the writer and reformer Bronson Alcott, father of the novelist Louisa May.

Poem of the week: Sic Vita by Henry David Thoreau. By Carol Rumens. The Guardian, July 6, 2020.

During most of his life Henry David Thoreau was, by conventional standards of success, a failure. He rarely left the farm town of Concord, Mass., where he was born in 1817. There he was viewed by at least some of his neighbors as a marginal figure, standoffish, politically radical, a loner, a crank. As a member of the New England literary world he cut a graceless figure and had an inauspicious professional start.

 His first book, “A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack River,” self-published in 1849, was a bust. He sold a mere fraction of its 1,000-copy press run. When the printer dumped the remainders on him, Thoreau stacked them up in his bedroom and wrote in his journal: “I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”
 
His second book, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” based on his experience of living in a one-room cabin and in a state of rural semi-self-quarantine, found more readers. And, crucially, they were ardent ones. From the book’s first appearance in 1854 his star began to rise. And within 10 years of his death in 1862, at 44, he was famous enough to be honored with a public monument.
 
An odd monument it was: a loose pile of stones set on the site of the one-room cabin Thoreau built at Walden Pond. The pile, usually referred to as a cairn, seems to have begun as an improvisation. In the summer of 1872, the suffragist Mary Newbury Adams, a Thoreau fan, visited Concord and asked to be taken to Walden. Her guide was the utopian thinker Bronson Alcott, one of Thoreau’s oldest friends. By this point, any physical trace of Thoreau was long gone and there was nothing to signal the site’s significance. Adams wanted to change that.
 
In his diary Alcott writes: “Mrs. Adams suggests that visitors to Walden shall bring a small stone for Thoreau’s monument and she begins the pile by laying stones on the site of his hermitage.” He too added a stone that day, as did members of a local church group who happened to be picnicking nearby. Word went out and the custom spread as, over the years, more pilgrims came. (I was one of them.) The heap of stones, most harvested from the pond’s edge, is still growing (and shrinking; some people take stones away as souvenirs). Like many religious shrines, it’s organic, in perpetual flux.
 
There are many different Thoreaus to commemorate: the environmentalist, the abolitionist, the ethnologist, the globalist, the anti-imperialist, the Yankee saint who earned the devotion of Tolstoy and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But to me, as a visitor to Walden since childhood, the cairn means most as the marker of an event: Thoreau’s two-year-plus experiment in self-isolation. It’s a condition many of us are experiencing during the present pandemic moment. And we can learn a lot from what Thoreau created from it: constructive solitude.
 
It’s important to note that his isolation was not the sheltering-in-place kind. It was not enforced (unless you consider life-style decisions made by a driven personality and deeply principled thinker to be beyond free choice). And his apartness was far from total. He went into Concord several times a week to catch up on gossip and have dinner with his relatives. At Walden, he entertained guests and enjoyed regular chats with Irish laborers who worked on a railroad line close to the pond.
 
At the same time, social distancing came naturally to him. He was, or could be, an irritable and thin-skinned guy, someone for whom the human species was a problem. (“I do not value any view of the universe into which man and institutions of man enter very largely,” he wrote.) When he was in a misanthropic mood, six to eight feet of separation wasn’t nearly enough. Try a mile and a half, which was the approximate distance from Walden to the center of town.

But if the Walden cabin, about the size of a garden shed, was in some sense a retreat, a refuge from “the noise of my contemporaries,” it had many more positive functions: it was a studio, a laboratory, an observatory, and a watchtower. Reading “Walden” — or, better, his more lucidly written journals — as I have done these last weeks, we sense that Thoreau viewed the Walden outpost less as a defensive necessity than as a place of opportunity where he could do what he could not easily do in the everyday world: namely, concentrate, focus, which I’ve always suspected was a way for him to handle incipient anxiety and despondency.
 

For one thing, he had that first book to write — an account of a boat trip he had taken several years earlier with his older brother John. The book would be Thoreau’s first attempt at the blend of field research, philosophy and autobiography that would become his signature mode. More important, the book would be a memorial to his beloved brother whose death from tetanus at 27 — he had nicked himself while shaving — shadowed Thoreau’s life.

 
He used his semi-seclusion at Walden, which began in July 1845 and ended in September 1847, to pursue an intensive course in self-education, one that required undistracted reading. “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written,” he wrote. The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far-reaching, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India.
 
In a letter to a friend he wrote: “The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.” He made his time at Walden one of those intervals.
 
(Interestingly, during the present lockdown, several of my friends have returned to a practice of meditation that their pre-pandemic lives had left little time for.)
 

The education further entailed a total immersion in Nature — in plants, in seasons, in stars, in all creatures four-legged, winged and scaled. For Thoreau, Nature was a communicating consciousness, and he wanted to make himself available to it, antennas raised. Full receptivity required removal from ego-driven clamor, which was how, in his most stressed moments, he viewed human discourse.
 
Finally, he used his set-aside time at Walden to clarify his political thinking. For Thoreau, revolution began at home, one person at a time. “We must first succeed alone,” he wrote, “that we may enjoy our success together.” It was while living at Walden that he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes that he saw as contributing to a warmongering, slavery-supporting government. At Walden he wrote the lecture that he would later shape into the essay known as “Civil Disobedience.”
 
Thoreau left Walden in 1847 to take a job as a caretaker in the household of his off-and-on friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the land on which Thoreau had built his cabin. His departure was both sudden and logical. “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.”
 
And he did have more lives, many; he once listed some of them: “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 Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.” And this makes no mention of the activist, the naturalist, the moral philosopher, the self-exile and the utopian-community-of-one — that is, the Thoreau we care most about now.
  
You might think of each stone on the Walden cairn as commemorating one of these identities or several intertwined. In his view, purposeful solitude and justice-minded community were codependent, the source of long-term social health. He knew what his view was up against: among other things, America’s antsy addiction to distraction and its led-by-the-nose, corporation-fed faith in utopian technology.
 
And the call for civil resistance — individual and collective — that issued from his Walden shelter? It is still hot-to-the-touch. Thoreau was not a pacifist. He vehemently supported the armed raid led by the abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry. When Brown was hanged, Thoreau delivered a furious public speech in Concord, standing under an upside-down United States flag. Surely the Civil War, underway when he died, came as no surprise.
 
But the monument of stones at Walden is the opposite of angry, or declarative or, for that matter, monumental. It speaks of aloneness-within-solidarity — a message we need to hear these days — in a homely down-to-earth way, one that Thoreau, who scorned all pomp and eye-baiting elegance (he once described himself as a “stuttering, blundering clod/hoper”) might have approved of.
 
It’s a monument designed by no one, built by everyone. It’s assembled one piece at a time, over time, by individuals who will never meet, but who, in our devotion, form a community of souls. It’s a monument that honors the dead, but is living, changing, growing. During the present crisis that is isolating us, this monument has the potential to bring us together: It is an instructive emblem to contemplate, and a consoling one.
 
Lessons in constructive solitude from Thoreau.  By Holland Cotter. The New York Times, April 9, 2020