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NY Times Sunday Book Review, July 23 2017
On Thoreau’s 200th Birthday, a New Biography Pictures Him as a Man of
Principle
By FEN MONTAIGNE
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
A Life
By Laura Dassow Walls
Illustrated. 615 pp. University of Chicago Press. $35.
More than 50 years have passed since the publication of the last major
biography of the iconic American author, naturalist, philosopher and
social activist Henry David Thoreau, and this superb new book could not
have come at a better time.
The author of “Walden” — an account of living for two years, two months
and two days on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. — was a
mid-19th-century visionary besotted with the wonders of the natural
world. Thoreau laid the groundwork for a field that would come to be
known as ecology. He was one of the first advocates for the
establishment of a system of national parks. He was a passionate
champion of the ethical treatment of all living things and embraced the
tenets of Eastern religion, incurring the wrath of fundamentalists who
accused him of blasphemy.
And he was a man devoted to science who compiled 12 volumes of notes on
the Native Americans of the northeastern United States, faithfully
chronicled the dates of the flowering of plants (an important record
today as the climate changes) and performed groundbreaking research into
the succession of trees in burned and logged forests. Asked once why he
was so eternally curious about things, Thoreau responded, “What else is
there in life?”
Laura Dassow Walls’s exuberant biography, “Henry David Thoreau: A Life,”
leaves the reader in no doubt how Thoreau might react to the current
administration in Washington, filled as it is with people who deny the
established physical science of global warming. Thoreau would pick up
his pen to skewer them mercilessly, and — practicing what he preached in
his essay “Civil Disobedience” — would probably take to the streets in
protest. Born 200 years ago today, Thoreau, like his fellow
Transcendentalists, propounded the philosophy of living “deliberately,”
by which they meant weighing the moral consequences of one’s actions. We
can easily imagine, then, what Thoreau might have to say about those who
worship at the altar of fossil fuels, given the indisputable evidence
that their combustion is now beginning to disrupt the stability of the
climate and the very rhythm of the seasons.
Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White professor of English at Notre
Dame, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man. As she
painstakingly demonstrates, Thoreau — who never married (“All nature is
my bride”) and who died at the age of 44 — was anything but the recluse
that some have made him out to be. He was a key member of the vibrant
intellectual community of Concord and played an important public role in
some of the great events of his time, notably the fight to abolish slavery.
One of the many pleasures of Walls’s book is how it transports us back
to America in the first half of the 19th century, a time when remnants
of Native American culture still existed in the Northeast, when New
England’s forests were being destroyed and its rivers dammed (shall we
“grub up” all our “national domains,” Thoreau asked) and when death from
all manner of disease was ever-present. Born in Concord to a
freethinking mother and a father who eventually became a prosperous
pencil manufacturer, Thoreau entered Harvard as a retiring boy of 16 and
emerged as a budding intellectual who read at least five languages.
Returning to Concord, he came under the sway of the poet and essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of Transcendentalism, who believed that
each individual contained a divine spark and had a responsibility to
cultivate the higher aspects of his or her nature. Emerson urged Thoreau
to seek solitude and keep a journal, and so the young man did,
eventually writing more than two million words in his diaries, books,
reports and articles.
He and his beloved older brother, John, founded an academy that was a
notable early experiment in American education — a school that rejected
corporal punishment and sought to teach not by rote but by igniting a
student’s own love of learning. But it was John’s agonizing death at 26
— he contracted tetanus after slicing off a tiny piece of a finger while
stropping a razor — that set Thoreau on the path that eventually led him
to Walden Pond.
In his mid-20s, Thoreau — who worked periodically as a surveyor —
enjoyed limited success publishing articles, some of them based on his
travels in Maine and Massachusetts. These pieces were the start of a
body of work that would make Thoreau a pioneer in what today is called
nature writing. But he longed to be a pioneer of a different sort, Walls
writes, “not a Western one, but an inward one.”
And so, seeking to “simplify, simplify,” he repaired to the shores of
Walden Pond, where he built a one-room structure measuring 10 feet by 15
feet by 8 feet. On July 4, 1845, just shy of his 28th birthday, Thoreau
moved in, opening his journal with the line, “Yesterday I came here to
live.”
These words laid the groundwork for an American masterpiece, one in
which Thoreau revels in the wonders of nature, his book echoing a theme
he had sounded in an earlier work: “Surely joy is the condition of
life!” Walls deftly sketches how Thoreau lived anything but a monastic
life at Walden, noting that his cabin was in sight of the main road,
that he entertained many guests, that trains regularly rumbled past on
the new rail line to Boston and that he took dinner with his family once
a week. Indeed, Walls writes, Thoreau was so much in the public eye at
Walden that his retreat there “would forever remain an iconic work of
performance art.”
Thoreau continued to write and lecture after he left Walden Pond. He and
his family were active in the abolitionist movement, their home a stop
on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax and spent
a night in jail because he believed the tax funded the state-sponsored
violence of slavery and the mistreatment of Mexicans and Native
Americans. “Let your life,” he wrote, “be a counter-friction to stop the
machine.” Witnessing the widespread destruction of nature as America’s
industrial economy boomed, Thoreau lamented, “Trade curses everything it
handles.”
“Walden” was published in 1854, and though it received generally
favorable reviews, only about 2,000 copies of the book were sold during
Thoreau’s lifetime. Indeed, he never enjoyed widespread popular or
commercial success while he was alive. But he carried on, optimistic
until the end, always remaining deeply rooted in Concord, Walden Pond
and the surrounding woods that were not under assault. Thoreau needed
nature as he did oxygen itself; in a book he was preparing for
publication as he succumbed to tuberculosis, he wrote, “In wildness is
the preservation of the world.”
He died with great equanimity. When asked by an aunt if he had made
peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
The day before his death, Thoreau was visited by an old friend, who
mentioned that he’d heard robins singing on his way there. In a whisper,
Thoreau replied: “This is a beautiful world, but soon I shall see one
that is fairer. I have so loved nature.”
Fen Montaigne is the senior editor at Yale Environment 360 and the
author of “Fraser’s Penguins.”
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