Henry David Thoreau - The Portable Thoreau

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE PORTABLE THOREAU

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. Self-described as a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot, Thoreau was known for his extreme individualism, his preference for simple, austere living, and his revolt against the demands of society and government. The two years he spent in a house he built, writing and observing nature, resulted in Walden (1854). He was the author of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Civil Disobedience (1849), Excursions (1863), and The Maine Woods (1864). Thoreau died in Concord in 1862.

JEFFREY S. CRAMER is Curator of Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. He is the editor of the award-winning Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition, and The Quotable Thoreau.

HENRY DAVID
THOREAU

The Portable Thoreau

Edited with an Introduction by
JEFFREY S. CRAMER

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2012

Introduction and selection copyright Jeffrey S. Cramer, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Thoreau, Henry David, 18171862.

The portable Thoreau / Henry David Thoreau; edited with an introduction by Jeffrey S. Cramer.

p. cm.(Penguin classics)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-101-12810-7

I. Cramer, Jeffrey S., 1955 II. Title.

PS3042.C687 2012

818.309dc23 2011043878

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To Kazia and Zo
because sooner or later
everyone needs to carry a little Thoreau with them

To my editor at Penguin, Elda Rotor, for appreciating the need for a new edition of the classic volume, The Portable Thoreau, originally edited by Carl Bode in 1947, and for making the call.

To Larry Buell, with special thanks.

And to my familyJulia, Kazia, and Zofor not thinking that just because Thoreau was portable this time they could get him out of our house.

Standing Up to Live, Sitting Down to Write

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow

THOREAU IN HIS JOURNAL, AUGUST 19, 1851

When Thoreau moved from Concord to New York in 1843, ostensibly to be the tutor for the children of Ralph Waldo Emersons brother, William, he was situating himself in the center of the American publishing world. Although for various reasons, including an overwhelming sense of homesickness, he returned to Concord and remained there for the rest of his life, it is clear that at this point Thoreau was determined to be a writer. Whatever else he may have beensocial reformer, naturalist, surveyor, pencil-maker, teacherhis work, as he would write in his journal on October 18, 1856, is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards.

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, and he died in Concord on May 6, 1862. During his forty-four years, or, more precisely, during the twenty-four years when he was actively writing, he wrote works that have become classics of American literatureWalden, a book on deliberate and purposeful living; Civil Disobedience, a treatise on a persons rights and duties in relation to an unjust government; and Walking, a piece on mans place in Naturein addition to writing a two-million-word journal.

Thoreaus success as a writer lies in the truth he utters. The questions he asks himself are the questions every individual, at his or her most attentive and sentient moments, asks. As he wrote, These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. Because the answers change, however, not only from generation to generation but for each individual from year to year, his writings are works to which we return, texts constantly reflecting our own evolution.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, Thoreau wrote in the Reading chapter of Walden, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. Reading in the way Thoreau meant, you will meet with a realization that many other readers will fail to achieve, which ultimately means that a good book must not only be written by a good writer but that it must be read by a good reader.

One way to be a good reader is to understand the nature of an essay. Wendell Berry defined it best in writing about Edward Abbeys essay Down the River with Henry Thoreau: It is an essay in the literal sense: a trial. Mr. Abbey tries himself against Thoreau and Thoreau against himself; he tries himself and Thoreau against the river; he tries himself and Thoreau and the river against modern times, and vice versa. This is how a reader should approach any piece by Thoreau.

Thoreau gave more than seventy lectures between his first in 1838 and his last in 1860. Sometimes he found members of his audience reading the newspaper. He once overheard one person say to another, What does he lecture for?