His attitudes toward Irish immigrants, women (who are strikingly absent from Thoreau’s writing), and, at least before his extended research into their lives, Native Americans are evidence of this. Nevertheless, he was a frequent, ferocious, and altogether eloquent critic of many of his fellow northerners’ complacencies, especially regarding what he deemed their effective support of slavery.

Thoreau was attuned to other forms of social degradation besides slavery. While we may with good reason look back on Thoreau’s age as a quieter, less hectic time than our own, in fact this was the age in which the United States established the dynamic presence that would so thoroughly transform lives both on the North American continent and abroad. The age of industrialism was well under way in New England, and firsthand accounts of the workings of the textile and other mills attest to the profound and, to many, disturbing transformations that came with this new age. Thoreau and other major writers in New England at the time were acutely aware of these transformations; a significant part of their distinctive genius stems from their ability to recognize and address what were, at that time, the nascent stirrings of characteristically American energies and ambitions. Impressed by the dynamic vigor of the railroad, Thoreau nonetheless saw that “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (pp. 75—76). He also recognized that the pace of people’s lives was accelerating, and that such acceleration had its costs: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate” (p. 44). His sentiment has since become a familiar complaint.

It was not just advancing industrialization and technology, however, that drove Thoreau to the shores of Walden Pond. As Walden’s first chapter, “Economy,” makes clear, Thoreau was responding to what he regarded as the decline of people’s sense of creative autonomy in the face of new social and economic conditions. Thoreau went to the woods, as he comments in that chapter, to live his life deliberately, because village and city life seemed to him to compromise any such reflective deliberation. “Let us settle ourselves,” he writes in Walden,

and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time (p. 80).

Though the comically extravagant prose is vintage and unmistakable Thoreau, this is a profoundly American sentiment. Thomas Jefferson, for example, comments in a well-known 1787 letter to his nephew Peter Carr: “Shake off all the fears and servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear” (Jefferson, Writings, p. 902). While Jefferson more firmly emphasizes the stabilizing role of reason in guiding the pursuit of this truth than does Thoreau, both writers locate the primary responsibility for such a pursuit in the individual, someone who at once resists a weak and servile received wisdom and searches boldly for a more stable and dependable truth. One could also look to more specifically religious backgrounds to this attitude, especially the liberal Protestant movements that demonstrated a similar skepticism of prevailing theological doctrines and the institutional mechanisms that typically served to enforce them. Thoreau, unlike Emerson and most other Transcendentalists, was never especially religious, but the New England culture of the day was so saturated with religious attitudes and controversy that Thoreau often seems religious even when he isn’t. From all of these sources, Thoreau had imbibed a thoroughgoing skepticism toward received traditions and ideas and a corollary faith in the individual’s often lonely and always heroic pursuit of truth.

But once this background is acknowledged, one is left with what is uniquely Thoreauvian about a passage like the one quoted above. First, a reader might take note of Thoreau’s quirky humor, as when he refers to a place where one might found a wall, or a state, or perhaps a lamp-post. Our political institutions must, he is asserting, rest pragmatically on as firm a ground as our walls and lampposts, or, like the latter, they risk deterioration and collapse. But no sooner has the reader processed the understated humor of this than Thoreau suggests another comparative term, a gauge: not a Nilometer (which serves to measure the rise and fall of the river Nile), he suggests, but, somewhat fantastically, a Realometer, which would serve future ages to measure “how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” It can indeed be hard to recognize shams and appearances, at least before anyone has exposed them as such. Whether because of the pious sermonizing of the clergy, the obfuscating rhetoric of politicians, or the presumably expert advice of journalists, scholars, and other public figures who regularly explain the complex world to us, shams and appearances can come to seem all too convincing and real. Thoreau’s Realometer would help us distinguish appearance from reality, giving us a more dependable understanding of our world and by extension a more stable foundation from which to make moral and political decisions.

It is fair to say that such a Realometer is an invention of Thoreau’s imagination; you aren’t going to be able to pick one up at the local hardware store anytime soon. But such whimsicality hardly discredits the passage and indeed is precisely what accounts for its unusual power. The very real problems addressed here are obviously not easily resolved: the need to distinguish truth from falsehood, genuine knowledge from persuasive rhetoric or what has more recently been called “manufactured consent.” The perfect absurdity of the image of a Realometer serves itself as a kind of figurative Realometer, reminding readers, as it has from Thoreau’s day to our own, of what it would mean to be able to make such measurements, while at the same time suggesting that such measurements can only be a function of a vigorous, determined, even playful imagination. Deliberation, it turns out, is also a kind of measuring, being rooted in an etymology that traces back to the Latin de libra, the scale best known today from the astrological sign Libra.