July 4, 1845—With an exquisite, surely self-conscious, sense of timing, Henry David Thoreau moved on Independence Day into the small cabin he had just finished building on land owned by friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and began the 26-month sojourn that culminated in his 1854 masterpiece, Walden.
Many of the ideas in Walden—the ecstatic embrace of nature, the oscillation between society and solitude, self-reliance—can also be found in Emerson. And just as, eight years before, Emerson had, in effect, issued an intellectual’s Declaration of Independence in his lecture “The American Scholar,” his younger disciple now sought to extend that notion.
"I am very familiar with all his thoughts,” Emerson noted about his younger friend, “they are my own quite originally drest." Precisely.
Emerson exerted a more powerful influence in the 19th century than Thoreau through his notion of individualism, but his consistently high-pitched tone—the style of the former preacher he was—can lull a modern reader. On the other hand, Thoreau’s is a new, distinctive American voice—rhapsodic, surely, but also by turns cranky, jaunty, ironic and packing a whole complex of thought into a few terse words. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” he writes, bringing us up sharply (especially after having just mentioned “Chinese and Sandwich Islanders”).
But turn to almost any page in the book and you’re likely to be surprised. For instance, toward the end: “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” He continually brings you up short, not just with his insights, but with the concise manner in which he expresses them.
As I mentioned in a post last year, Thoreau came by his sense of isolation naturally, as many in Concord had come to sneer at him after he and friend Edward Hoar accidentally set fire to a large portion of its woods.
But Thoreau used his 26 months in the Walden cabin to great advantage. Walden, like all truly great revolutionary documents, continues to resonate years after the fact.
I’m not thinking here strictly of his care for the environment, his urging that readers forgo the material goods of this world, or his advocacy of nonconformity. In addition, I wish his chapter on “Reading” could be reproduced and handed out at any town meeting where short-sighted politicians decide the first thing they want to cut is a library or the school system. "If it is necessary," he wrote, "omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."
Many of the ideas in Walden—the ecstatic embrace of nature, the oscillation between society and solitude, self-reliance—can also be found in Emerson. And just as, eight years before, Emerson had, in effect, issued an intellectual’s Declaration of Independence in his lecture “The American Scholar,” his younger disciple now sought to extend that notion.
"I am very familiar with all his thoughts,” Emerson noted about his younger friend, “they are my own quite originally drest." Precisely.
Emerson exerted a more powerful influence in the 19th century than Thoreau through his notion of individualism, but his consistently high-pitched tone—the style of the former preacher he was—can lull a modern reader. On the other hand, Thoreau’s is a new, distinctive American voice—rhapsodic, surely, but also by turns cranky, jaunty, ironic and packing a whole complex of thought into a few terse words. “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” he writes, bringing us up sharply (especially after having just mentioned “Chinese and Sandwich Islanders”).
But turn to almost any page in the book and you’re likely to be surprised. For instance, toward the end: “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.” He continually brings you up short, not just with his insights, but with the concise manner in which he expresses them.
As I mentioned in a post last year, Thoreau came by his sense of isolation naturally, as many in Concord had come to sneer at him after he and friend Edward Hoar accidentally set fire to a large portion of its woods.
But Thoreau used his 26 months in the Walden cabin to great advantage. Walden, like all truly great revolutionary documents, continues to resonate years after the fact.
I’m not thinking here strictly of his care for the environment, his urging that readers forgo the material goods of this world, or his advocacy of nonconformity. In addition, I wish his chapter on “Reading” could be reproduced and handed out at any town meeting where short-sighted politicians decide the first thing they want to cut is a library or the school system. "If it is necessary," he wrote, "omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."
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