Thoreau - Walden: or Life in the woods

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Epub ISBN: 9781473547933

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Introduction copyright Benjamin Markovits 2017

Cover illustration Cruschiform

Henry David Thoreau has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in 1854

This edition published by Vintage in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the town where he would live for most of his life. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is the most famous of the American Transcendentalists, a group of philosophical thinkers who frequently explored the relationship between human beings and the natural world. He was educated at Harvard, and over the course of his life took on a number of different occupations, including lead-pencil maker, schoolteacher, and surveyor.

Thoreau was outspokenly critical of the American government, fervently opposed to slavery, and an advocate of passive resistance. Whilst Walden (1854) is his best known work, his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience has inspired non-violent political activists the world over, including Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr, and his nature writings are considered ground-breaking works in ecology. He died in his hometown of Concord in 1862.

In 1845 Thoreau, a Harvard-educated 28-year-old, went to live by himself in the woods in Massachusetts. He stayed for over two years, living self-sufficiently in a small cabin built with his own hands. Walden is his personal account of the experience, in which he documents the beauty and fulfilment to be found in the wilderness, and his philosophical and political motivations for rejecting the materialism which continues to define our modern world.

In August of 2008, three months before Obama won his first presidential election, my wife and I and our baby girl moved from London to Boston. I say Boston, but in fact we lived in Cambridge in a ground-floor apartment just off Porter Square and down the road from Raymond Park, where, it was rumoured, Larry Bird used to come and shoot hoops, and where my daughter learned to climb. She was almost two when we arrived; she was almost three when we left. Her first accents were American.

That year has slowly changed colour in my memory and imagination. At the time we were still stuck in the intensity of early parenthood. The apartment was dark and cramped. It snowed without thawing for five months, so that parking our second-hand car meant finding an unoccupied ramp of ice to drive up. The car itself kept breaking down, leaving us stranded on highways and in unfamiliar neighbourhoods. We had few friends and were living in a city we didnt know and which, for my wife, represented a foreign country. Our daughter kept waking at four or five in the morning, and in the evening, we couldnt go out without the hassle and expense of a babysitter. The short winter days felt long. But now at this distance the trap that seemed to have caught us works the other way around the walls encircling that year wont let us back in.

The best thing about living in Boston, we used to say, is how easy it is to get out of Boston. One of our favourite day trips involved driving north and west twenty minutes out of town and going to Walden, especially in those first few months when the leaves were turning and later, in the spring, after the thaw, when a muddy bit of shoreline became a beach, and kids splashed around in the shallows. The place still seemed to me a working pond. People swam in it (unofficially) and walked around the edge it takes about half an hour. Thoreaus original hut is gone, but the replica in its place does the job. You can duck under the doorway and stand between the windows (which cost him two dollars and forty-three cents, including glass) and stare at the bed, the stove, the table and the three chairs. For someone whose rented rooms were covered with plastic toys, the bareness of the place seemed almost grand. It has everything you need, but not much room for kids.

About three minutes away, at least by car, just south of the woods, between Walden and Flints Pond, is the Walter Gropius House. We liked to visit it afterwards: a white box, cleverly dressed up in angles and set on a sloping expensive-looking lawn. Inside, you feel the architects careful attention to ordinary life the coat rack behind the twisting stairs, the built-in furniture. Theres also a room for their daughter, and the contrast makes for part of the appeal: the moral simplicity of Thoreaus house, the aesthetic simplicity of Gropiuss. Although the hut is also pleasing to the eye, and theres a modesty in modernism, too. Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, Thoreau says, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have. Gropius would probably have agreed.

And yet the hut and the house are also worlds apart. They represent a choice, between two kinds of ambition, two kinds of life. Thoreau in Walden isnt always generous to architects:

True, there are architects so-called in this country, and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, but only a little better than the common dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the cornice, not at the foundation.

He was thinking (according to the notes of the Riverside edition I bought that year) of a sculptor called Horatio Greenough, whose functionalist aesthetic anticipated to a certain extent the Bauhaus and whose essays were rediscovered around the time that Gropius settled in Massachusetts.

On a Saturday afternoon, driving from one house to the other, you can imagine yourself in the shoes of the Harvard professor, working at your desk in the wide-windowed study, and later, joining your students for dinner, while they admire the house you designed yourself and envy you or in the shoes of the young Harvard grad, perched in front of the fire whose chimney you built with your own hands, a mile from any neighbour, on a hard chair, reading, while the night closes in and you can hear the loons calling over the lake.