Imagine a young man in the 1850s striding off into the woods close to Boston and living alone in a log cabin for two years. He then writes a book about it and names it after the lake next to which he lived for that time- Walden. What can you reasonably expect from it? A log of how he built the house (on his own); how he fed and sustained himself (as he 'lived by the labour of my hands only'), specially in this lonely winter months; and perhaps some philosophical insights about the whole experience. After all, he was not that far from his town of Concorde and visited it often enough; and this was not a grand adventure like walking across America or a transatlantic voyage. Was Thoreau and his book famous by exception, because he was the oddity- a philosopher in an up-and-coming America that lay so much emphasis on commercial enterprise?
These were my thoughts when I picked up the book. What I found was an exciting book that beat all those low expectations. In his very first chapter 'Economy', he captures the reader with the striking arguments he makes for the principle that was the motivation for his two year stay- that true wealth and happiness comes through shunning the laboured accumulation of material riches. It is not a new message, but is delivered so well that right away you realize this is an extraordinary person with an extraordinary clarity of thought and a great gift for words. As I read further, I had a pencil in hand- the book had too many statements that took my breath away and compelled my graphitic tribute. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.", he said, as they work endlessly to support lands, farms and houses that are supposed to support them. Also immediately evident is his contempt for conventional wisdom or the advice of seniors. This is not arrogance but the sign of a true moral compass- this was the age of slavery and Thoreau was one of the few who had the courage to stand up against that accepted practice of society.
The second thing that struck me was that this Harvard graduate was a scholar of subjects much beyond the walls of his Alma Mater. He quotes extensively from the Vedas, from Hindu fables, from Kabir, from Confucius, from the Greek epics. This was no empty display of academic achievement- his entire philosophy was a distillation of great purity from these readings. His attitude was not of erudition but of a deep love for the truth in those timeless writings. "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!", said he. "It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India.", he said, when itemizing his food related expenses. How many of us can claim this voracious appetite for wisdom from distant lands, specially at such an young age?
The third thing is his amazing love for all things nature. Solitude was not loneliness because he immersed himself in every aspect of pristine nature that was at Walden. No detail was too small and beauty was everywhere- in the blue of Walden lake, in the red squirrels that gave him company, the hare, the partridge, the owl, the eagle, the fish. Who carries out purposeful pilgrimages to individual trees in the woods? In this respect he was like Muir or Melville, devoting entire chapters to bubbles under the ice, epic wars between ants (written with great humour!), or to patterns in the sand as the ice of winter melted.
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| Sometimes, .. I spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. |
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| Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. 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. |
His descriptions of the seasons is as methodical as it is aesthetic. For him, the long lone winters were times to be spent with his books and his winter companions- visiting poets, philosophers and resident owls. Spring is the subject of many writers- but Thoreau beats them all hands down.
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| The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. |
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| The snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names. |
But the sum total of the book is its sublime wisdom. He was a rishi in New England attire, his cabin his deerskin seat, and Walden the purifying waters of his austerities. His deep connection with Eastern and timeless truths is why this book became the inspiration of latter day Eastern saints with similar moral clarity and eloquence - Tolstoy and Gandhi. So it seems apt that, on the eve of the first non-cooperation movement in India, the first Satyagraha booklet distributed by Gandhi was simply a reprint of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.
So this is the answer to the question I posed in the first few sentences of this post: A young man's simple account of an uneventful stay in a wooden cabin became the cement for the convictions of giants among men, who changed the very course of human history.
I will leave you with his own words of his lessons from the experience: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings"
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