Reflections on Walden Pond
From the excerpts of Thoreau’s Walden that I read 14 years ago without the background knowledge that I have now, I got the impression that Thoreau wanted to replace human interactions with nature and become a hermit. This was a very shallow understanding of his intentions, which have actually provided a poignant and timeless social commentary. Henry David Thoreau was a prominent figure in the transcendentalist movement. The transcendentalists believed in the innate good in humans and that people are at their best when they are self-reliant. Thoreau wrote Walden after spending two years in a cabin he built himself next to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts on land owned by his friend. He considered this time in the woods an experiment to see if he could “conjure up” the truth of the world and live simply and self-reliantly.
In Walden, Thoreau addresses many societal issues, from the slave trade to housing affordability. His aspiration to live deliberately is the main tie between him and Jenny Odell. Thoreau and Odell are both noticers of the shortcomings of society — Thoreau in the late 1800s and Odell now — and you may be surprised to hear that they come to many of the same conclusions regarding our relationships with social norms. Thoreau goes a few steps further than Odell in his call to action, however; he implores his readers to be independent not just mentally and physically, but also economically. Thoreau’s words are still poignant because some of the topics he addresses are still persisting or have had rippling effects with which our country is still grappling with today. We can consider his assessments, compare them to our time, and see that if our society is to truly thrive, individuals must maintain their independence — mentally, physically, and economically.
Thoreau’s version of mental independence is being true to oneself and acting and speaking in line with one’s own moral compass. He urges, “Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.” (Thoreau 463) Thoreau was thrown in jail for the extreme measures by which he acted according to his beliefs. He quit paying his taxes because he felt he could no longer “recognize the authority of a State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.” (Thoreau 338) To satisfy a moral dilemma in which he found himself, he chose to boycott the governing body and remove himself from the society it led. For these actions, Odell utilizes Thoreau as an example of her “third space” in her book, How to Do Nothing. (Odell 74) Odell believes that the best way to escape the attention economy is to inhabit the “third space” in one’s mind where one can live within current society but always be critical of where one’s attention is being pulled and by whom and for what purpose. Both Thoreau’s concept of living deliberately and Odell’s idea of a “third space” encourage individuals to reject the status quo and think for themselves. Thoreau and Odell are both saying that we need to observe what is happening around us, (whether it be a constant and detrimental demand for our attention or a more visceral injustice such as slavery or police brutality) and then rely on our own morals to judge what is right and wrong and what actions we will take going forward.
Thoreau says “a man [should] maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.” (Thoreau 458) The bitterness Thoreau shows toward a lack of “just governance” was similar to how I felt during the Trump impeachment process. During this process, there was overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing by the president but the senators still voted in alignment with their party instead of according to their personal assessment of the facts. But, to my surprise, Mitt Romney became the first senator to ever vote against his own party in an impeachment trial. In this instance Romney is an example of someone acting according to his morals instead of mindlessly conforming to social and political pressures; he decided that acting truthfully was more important than compromising his beliefs to meet the expectations of his position; doubtless, Thoreau would have commended him for his action.
Spending time alone or maintaining a level of physical independence is another creed that Odell and Thoreau champion as a means of achieving one’s true potential. Thoreau remarks, “Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. … and I think we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly, less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.” (Thoreau 308) He believes that we become dull to each other when we interact too often- imagine what he would say about the attention economy and social media — probably something to the effect of “how can I miss you if you don’t ever leave.” In How to Do Nothing, one of Odell’s main points is that thanks to modern technology including smartphones and social media, it is nearly impossible to be truly alone nowadays and that there is, in fact, a high expectation by one’s friends, family, and even employer that one can be reached instantly and whenever they deem it necessary. Thoreau and Odell both address the value and importance of being alone, for it is in these times that one is able to think deeply and reflect, to discover who one is, what one believes, what one believes in, and what one finds important in this world instead of listening to society’s incessant commentary about what clothes to wear; how much money to earn, save, and spend; and how many hours a week to work for it. The implication is that one cannot possibly hope to maintain strong mental independence without also cultivating physical independence as well; thus, it becomes clear that physical, mental, and even economic independence are inseparable from one another.
Economic independence is a large theme of Walden as part of Thoreau’s experiment was to see if he could simply exist independently without the assistance of the society he rejected. One statement he makes that particularly piqued my interest was about the cost of living.
“In the [Native American] state,” he says, “every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the [native americans] their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own their shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay [rent] which would buy a village of [native american] wigwams, but now helps keep them poor as long as they live.” (Thoreau 221)
One-hundred and fifty years ago, Thoreau was thinking about how absurd and unjust was a society which imposed fees on the poor for housing that required them to work long, hard days in order to afford it — offering little to no time for them to better themselves, their circumstances, and their livelihoods. He was a proponent of living within one’s means and wanted to show those who could not afford the expense of society that there was an alternative to the losing battle they were fighting. Thoreau does concede that he was technically a “squatter” on his friend’s property while conducting his experiment; regardless, he built a shack on his friend’s land and started farming on “unsuitable” soil. When he was not tending to his garden he did other odd-jobs, fished, and relaxed. At the end of the two years, he shares his financial account and reveals that he spent the same amount of money building his house as he would have paid for one year of rent in town. He shows that by living simply and by having somewhere to start, owning one’s own shelter is not an unreasonable goal, nor one that would take very long to achieve if one would simply lower certain expectations such as square footage, quality of furnishings, and prime location.
It is my observation that in modern times, people don’t just work more so they can afford to survive; now they use tomorrow’s wages to pay for today’s luxuries. Credit and the gross misuse of it in modern society simply exacerbate the issues that keep the poor “poor as long as they live.” Credit allows and encourages one not only to spend everything one has in the present, but also the money one will make in the future, which tethers people not only to lenders and interest but often to a type of lifestyle they can not hope to maintain independently. These days we are surrounded by a luxurious lifestyle that would make kings and queens from a century ago envious. We can get cuisine from anywhere in the world on a whim, we have more comfortable living arrangements than any previous society, and we dress much like royalty, with the accessories to match. We are pressured to conform to this lifestyle in so far as we lack the physical, mental, and economic independence to resist the lure of society to look and live in a certain way. A modern and increasingly acceptable version we see of Thoreau’s “squatting” is moving back in with one’s parents after shoving off on one’s maiden voyage of “independence,” (often to college). Thoreau would suggest that if one strives to live a simpler life, one could work according to one’s own desires instead of in order to keep up with the Joneses and would thus maintain more economic independence as well as feel more satisfied with one’s choices in life. He writes, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived more simple and meagre life than the poor.” (Thoreau 208)
I was surprised at the relevance of the words Thoreau wrote one-hundred and fifty years ago in today’s culture and at how much they resonate within me personally. If I’d read Walden in its entirety in 11th grade, I might be living in a cabin in the woods myself right now. Seeing as that isn’t an immediate option for me or many others, we can instead apply the truths that Thoreau “conjures up” to become the best version of ourselves in our current situations. We can find time to be alone, to recharge, and to discover ourselves and the natural world around us. We can live true to ourselves — practice acting and speaking in a way that reveals our moral fiber. And finally, we can choose to live within our means. We can do without anything that we can’t afford and, to the best of our ability, reject the attention economy and consumerism.
Wouldn’t we all be happier if we each had a place to live that was truly our own rather than borrowed or leased by someone with an unforgiving hold on the financial reins? If we rejected the idea that external validation through attention or approval was necessary in order to be valuable people with voices worth hearing and lives worth celebrating, regardless of the sacrifice of a few comforts it would take to achieve, we could regain control of our lives. Reclaiming our mental, physical, and economic independence may be the best thing for ourselves and our society. I like to think the transcendentalists are right — we are more resourceful, intelligent, and powerful than we know; to discover this for ourselves we need only throw off the constraints perpetuated by a society that preys on our inability to perceive it.
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflecting from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before his door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town’s poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving.” (Thoreau 463)
References
Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY, Melville Home Publishing, 2019.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Portable Thoreau. Penguin Books, 2012.
