Why walden matters now

What he didn't eat he sold. Contrary to popular belief, he went to town frequently, entertained visitors at the cabin and once even hosted a large picnic there for an abolition society. But mostly he worked at his desk, where he accomplished a great deal of writing. Drawing on a two-week-long trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine and his brief arrest in Concord for failing to pay his poll tax, he wrote essays on "Katahdin" and "Civil Disobedience" which remains the preeminent American statement of the primacy of individual conscience.

In his writings, and in Walden above all, Thoreau forged a thought-out way of life, a philosophy that insists that the individual turn not to the state, not to the gods, not to society, or even to history for a guide to life, but to nature and the self. But this turn to nature and the self should not be confused with selfishness. It is not the final destination but only the starting point of the examined life.

Thoreau's social side is everywhere in Walden. Thoreau's second great achievement is one he shares with Emerson and other American Transcendentalists: the articulation of the social imperatives of their movement. If I wish to be free, the Transcendalists argued, then all must wish to be free, and none may be denied freedom.

In the formulation of the African-American writer and leader Frederick Douglass, "there is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong, for him. Thoreau's activism led him to make speeches and organize meetings to protest slavery, to work for the Underground Railroad, to defend the abolitionist John Brown and help get one of his men to Canada, and to write "Civil Disobedience.

The principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. Thoreau's third great achievement is that he first articulated America's conservation ethic.

When Thoreau said, famously, "in Wildness is the preservation of the world," he means the preservation of civilization too. We need the tonic of wildness.

Walden was published on August 9, , to mostly good reviews, and it developed a small but steady following. It sold roughly copies a year for the next 15 years. After a brief dip in popularity in the s and early s, the book began the steady climb that carried it through the 20th century and that shows no signs of slowing.

Thoreau's Walden speaks to our modern condition because it is mostly right about the big things. Open the book anywhere: One should beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. A person is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. Morning does bring back the heroic ages. When Thoreau first moves into his dwelling on Independence Day, it gives him a proud sense of being a god on Olympus, even though the house still lacks a chimney and plastering.

He does not view himself as the slave of time; rather he makes it seem as though he is choosing to participate in the flow of time whenever and however he chooses, like a god living in eternity.

Thoreau thus reminds us again that he is neither practical do-it-yourself aficionado nor erudite philosopher, but a mixture of both at once, attending to matters of everyday existence and to questions of final meaning and purpose.

This chapter pulls away from the bookkeeping lists and details about expenditures on nails and door hinges, and opens up onto the more transcendent vista of how it all matters, containing less how-to advice and much more philosophical meditation and grandiose universalizing assertion. Emersonian self-reliance is not just a matter of supporting oneself financially as many people believe but a much loftier doctrine about the active role that every soul plays in its experience of reality.

Reality for Emerson was not a set of objective facts in which we are plunked down, but rather an emanation of our minds and souls that create the world around ourselves every day.

He describes its placement in the cosmos, in a region viewed by the astronomers, just as God created a world within the void of space. He says outright that he resides in his home as if on Mount Olympus, home of the gods. He claims a divine freedom from the flow of time, describing himself as fishing in its river. He opines that the last important bit of news to come out of England was about the revolution of , almost two centuries earlier.

The only current events that matter to the transcendent mind are itself and its place in the cosmos. One of the many delightful pursuits in which Thoreau is able to indulge, having renounced a big job and a big mortgage, is reading. There are spaces shot through our massively complex society to find "Simplicity! Take another grave and important personality of the time, Abraham Lincoln. His views on technology, delivered in a series of speeches on "Discoveries and Inventions" in the years directly after Thoreau's Walden, were more positive.

For Lincoln, technology did not debase humanity, as Thoreau would have contended, but it also wasn't a magical staircase leading to a better world under the label of Progress. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword.