Words&Dirt

Thoreau’s Walden is a masterpiece of transcendentalist philosophy that has inspired many generations of Americans. It’s also a text ripe for revival. My generation is trying to balance our dependence on modern technology with our love of the quickly-vanishing natural world. Too often it feels like we are caught in a zero-sum game pitting modernity against nature.

Can we begin mending the scars of past destruction while still venturing boldly into an uncertain future? Can Walden help teach us how to honor both of these seemingly contradictory goals? I believe it can. Thoreau’s rambling, deeply observant, and often humorous voice calls across the decades with sonorous warmth and unparalleled exuberance. Walden offers a barrage of insights that, if taken to heart, can sow the seeds of an authentic and ethical relationship with the natural world.

As I see it, the question at the heart of Walden is this: How can humanity develop and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with its surrounding environment? This requires us to consider how interacting with nature can make us better people. Thoreau views nature as a portal through which humanity can understand its unique qualities and limits:

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. (205)

Our dual longing for knowledge and mystery is still at the forefront of human conflict. The frontiers of knowledge have changed radically since Thoreau’s time, but the dynamic remains the same; we want true and reliable information about the world, but not so much that there will be nothing left to ponder or bemuse. In taking up the magic staff of advanced technology and enlightened thinking, we invariably reveal vast new caverns of the unknown. As we acquire and begin exerting powers previously reserved only for the gods, in what ways will we come to newly “witness our own limits transgressed”?

This question doesn’t just apply to scientific inquiry and technological progress, but also to ethics. For Thoreau, naturalism and ethics are inextricable practices. Moral vitality is as the dawn:

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering?…We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake…I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. (58-9)

We are in and of nature, always subject to its patterns and whims. Yet we have the power to “affect the quality of the day” through moral action. There is a vast system of exchange between individual, society, and nature, with all members continually absorbing resources while simultaneously giving away energy. Things given––expressions, words, actions––reverberate outward and return to us in ways we cannot track. But experience reveals a trend: give yourself, authentically, thoughtfully, compassionately, and you stand a good chance of getting such in return. So we learn to “carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,” and over time, progress can be made. Occasionally, we wake to find that the moral problems of the moment are of a different kind than those that ailed our forebears.

Tracking the relationship between nature and ethical life also involves evaluation. How do we measure the value of nature, or the moral quality of humankind? Thoreau suggests a continuity between these judgments, anchoring both in natural law. He measures a human as he measures a pond:

Draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. (188)

In a era when morality and natural law were considered unrelated areas of study, Thoreau linked them with prophetic verve. We still argue about how to measure the “length and breadth” of moral character, but few question whether it’s appropriate to do so using the same forms of inquiry we apply to the natural world.

Despite these concrete gains, we are everywhere running into snags and ethical quandaries. We wield our weapons like the pouty apes we are, and weave reassuring stories to explain away the disconnect between our biological realities and our lofty pretensions. Thoreau had his failings as well, the most prominent of which was his endearing but naive romanticism:

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time…not till we are completely lost, or turned around…do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature…Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (111)

There’s a lot of poetic language here, and more than a modicum of truth. But Thoreau’s assertion that being lost in the woods is a “valuable experience” is merely a half-truth. It ignores the confusion, fear, and suffering that often accompany the experience of losing one’s way. Thoreau seems content to forget that an innocent stroll can become deadly for the ill-equipped or the unlucky.

Even when purporting to address the brutality of nature, Thoreau appears celebratory:

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,––tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!…Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. (205-6)

It’s true that we can momentarily cope with mortality by looking past individual existence into the greater story of natural processes, but this is little comfort to the victims of blind circumstance or nature’s crueler designs. Do the tadpoles and tortoises and toads glory in their destruction? The natural world––beautiful and awe-inspiring as it can be––is also a meat grinder that hears no prayers and sheds no tears. Thoreau is quick to dismiss modernity, with its hasty machines and long workdays, but forsakes these for a green-boughed haven that never existed.

This attitude runs through the whole of Walden, and is bound up with Thoreau’s unmistakable sense of intellectual and moral superiority over his fellow New Englanders. Though happy to hoe beans with his bare bands, Thoreau doesn’t want to get his soul dirty:

Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it…He is blessed who is assured that that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace…Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome. (142-3)

On one hand, Thoreau can hardly be criticized for buying into the oppositional dichotomy between divinity and nature that was common to 19th century thought. But, unlike so many other passages in Walden, these sentiments are not at home in the 21st century. To kill off the animal within would be suicide, for the animal is all we have. To be sure, our animal instincts are not all equally desirable, and we can train them to serve good or evil, but we need no longer concern ourselves with the preservation of diaphanous divinity––no such thing exists. Terrestrial virtue and progress we can keep, but to transcend nature entirely is obliteration.

Returning to the question of what Walden can teach us today, two messages are clear. The first is that we must not become so distracted with our inventions that we lose sight of the miracle of existence, which continually unfolds before us.

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. (87, emphasis his)

We can take a deep breath, perceive the world around us, and be grateful. But then we must work, both with and for our fellow living beings. This is Thoreau’s second message. Drudgery and suffering induce somnolence, which cuts us off from the the “prospect of awakening or coming to life.” So we try to awaken the “workman whose work we are,” not seeking to vanquish slumber in one mighty blow, but through the slow work of the tide and the scratching of many hands.

If we are lucky, our daily labors terminate at a shelter––a safe space for ourselves and our loved ones. But we must not guard it too jealously, nor seek to expand it beyond reason, because we do not truly own it. Nature has a right to itself, and there is enough to go around.

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. (108)

It is impossible to fully comprehend the results of seeds sown locally but harvested globally. Trapped in our bodies and individualized pockets of information, we guess and hint, but cannot pull back and see nature’s true self. It is a portrait too vast and deep for us––perhaps for any conscious creature. Therefore, a kind of faith is required. Not a faith born from a perceived alliance with the indifferent universe, but an affirmation of our ignorance of final ends. We do not stand to gain or lose everything, because everything cannot be contained. But neither do we stand to gain or lose nothing, because one moment is truly distinct from the next, and in that transition we can choose knowledge and progress, or ignorance and stagnation.

Even now, nature is our best teacher.

Rating: 9/10