Thoreau, as attentive to the roots of words as he was to the roots of plants, would surely have known this when he claimed to want to live his life deliberately. As a professional surveyor, he knew the value of weights and measures and the knowledge they impart, of the close inspection and careful demarcation of the physical conditions of things; as a writer, he searched constantly for ways to connect material and mechanical processes to the deeper psychological and moral purposes of a life lived deliberately. The Realometer is another Thoreauvian extravagance, promising a solid foundation and yet doing so in a language and style that already exceed any imagined ground of stability.

Thoreau is everywhere extravagant in this way. It is the hallmark of his style. The simplicity and earnestness of his self-presentation are everywhere compromised, though some might also say given richness and depth, by the always strategic sense with which he develops his material. In effect, Thoreau uses extravagance as a means to deliver a shock to the reader’s system, hoping ultimately to jolt his reader into some kind of action. His position is really very simple: Americans are suffering a kind of moral and spiritual depression, brought on by new and increasingly pervasive social and economic conditions that undermine individuals’ sense of material and moral agency. These conditions require individuals to sacrifice their creativity and individuality in order to keep the social and economic mechanisms operating smoothly. The early chapters of Walden—much of the material that made up his popular lecture “Economy”—are filled with examples of how men and women are driven by trivial social expectations, and how these ultimately leave them alienated from their surroundings. The movement to Walden was intended to “simplify” Thoreau’s own living conditions and so to free him from all such externally imposed designs and expectations.

In the end, of course, nobody is ever entirely free of these designs and expectations. James Russell Lowell was right when he noted that “Thoreau’s experiment presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured” (Lowell, p. 380). But he utterly missed the point that sometimes individuals need to position themselves on the margins of social institutions in order to promote their transformation. Thoreau simply refused to be complacent about his relationship to the social environment that formed and supported him. He hoped that his reflections on his Walden experience, like his account of his night in jail, would help bring a new spirit of freedom and possibility to American social and political life. In this sense, for all the apparent isolation of the hero of Walden, and for all the apparent advocacy of such radically independent experience, Thoreau’s aims in Walden are always social. His is the constant reminder, so central to a democratic society where consensus necessarily rules the day, that individuals have an obligation to challenge the status quo when that status quo diminishes their lives and the lives of others. In Walden, Thoreau uses his retreat to the woods as a way of framing a reflection on both what ails men and women in their contemporary condition and what might provide relief. It cannot be said that the book resolves these issues, especially since so many of the social and psychological problems Thoreau addresses remain unresolved in the early twenty-first century. But Thoreau did as much as anyone to define the problem for Americans and to insist on the ultimate value of every individual’s vigorous and creative agency, even in the face of persistent dehumanization and despair.

 

Jonathan Levin is Dean of Humanities and Professor of Literature and Culture at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Duke University Press, 1999), as well as numerous essays and reviews. He was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 1998 and 1999, and is presently at work on a study of American literary ecology since Thoreau.

Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Economy.

WHEN I WROTE THE following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.