In a world where you blink and miss something, it is hard to shut your eyes sometimes.
Even without smartphones, streaming and social media, at the ripe old age of 28, Henry David Thoreau was ready to "unplug," at least in a way that made sense to 19th-century society. He abandoned all his material possessions and his job at the family pencil factory in the bustling town of Concord, Massachusetts.
For two years, two months and two days, he lived alone, in a tiny cabin he built on the edge of Walden Pond.
In 1854, shortly after his time alone, he published Walden; or Life in the Woods, depending on which version you might have seen at the book store or read in high school.
It is one of the greatest arguments ever made in favor of simple living.
And even though Thoreau was writing more than 150 years ago, his words were prescient: his angst at the restless pace of life is something that many of us feel today. Especially in the age of quarantines brought on by the Coronavirus.
Walden could be considered a swan song for an antique enjoyment of time alone. Our devices we have come to rely upon so much in our modern age have cheated us out of the solitude we might otherwise appreciate. Solitude becomes a reality as we sit at home cut off from people and the commerce of our daily lives waiting for life to return to "normal" once again.
When we wake up, we reach for our phone, instead of for the person next to us, or we get in the shower and, even after the five minutes of solitude in the shower, it feels like maybe too much. This is the state of being that we are in these days. The primary conundrum we are in is balancing solitude with our technology.
Thoreau once suggested that the more unhappy we are with ourselves, the more we run to the mailbox.
And I think about that a lot when I dig into my pocket for my phone. It says something about what is going on inside of me: how content I am with my own life. And I think the reverse must be true to that, if we design a rich interior life for ourselves.
During most of his life, Thoreau would be considered by conventional standards as a failure. In his hometown he was viewed as a marginal figure, standoffish, politically radical, a loner and a crank. As a member of the New England literary world he cut a graceless figure and had an inauspicious professional start.
His first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack River, was self published in 1849 and was a bust, selling only a fraction of the 1,000 copies. When the printer dumped the remaining copies on him, he stacked them in his bedroom and wrote in his journal: "I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself."
Walden became his second book and it found more readers. And, even more importantly, they were ardent readers, and his star began to rise.
There are, in fact, many facets to his character: environmentalist, abolitionist, ethnologist, globalist, anti-imperialist and Yankee saint who earned the devotion of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The most famous persona, of course, is as an isolationist, since it is an experience many of us face during the present pandemic. And we can learn a lot from what Thoreau created from his experience at Walden pond: Constructive solitude.
It is important to note that his isolation was not the sheltering-in-place kind we are experiencing today. It was not enforced (unless you consider life-style decisions made by a driven personality and deeply principled thinker to be beyond free choice). And his apartness was far from total. He went into Concord several times a week to catch up on gossip and have dinner with his relatives. At Walden, he entertained guests and enjoyed regular chats with Irish laborers who worked on a railroad line close to the pond.
At the same time, social distancing came naturally to him. Something we might do well to adapt in this time of Coronavirus and its upcoming aftermath. He was, or could be, an irritable and thin-skinned guy, someone for whom the human species was a problem. "I do not value any view of the universe into which man and institutions of man enter very largely," he wrote. When he was in a misanthropic mood, six to eight feet of separation was not nearly enough, try a mile and a half, which was the approximate distance from Walden to the center of town.
But if the Walden cabin, about the size of a garden shed, was in some sense a retreat, a refuge from "the noise of my contemporaries," it had many more positive functions: it was a studio, a laboratory, an observatory and a watchtower. Reading Walden or Thoreau's journals, we sense that he viewed the Walden outpost less as a defensive necessity than as a place of opportunity where he could do what he could not easily do in the everyday world: namely, focus, which I have always suspected was a way for him to handle incipient anxiety and despondency.
He had his first book to write after all. He also wanted to pursue undistracted reading. "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written," he wrote. His reading list was long, ambitious and culturally far reaching. The education further entailed a total immersion in nature. For Thoreau, nature was a communicating consciousness. Full receptivity required removal from his ego-driven clamor, which was how, in his most stressed moments, he viewed human discourse.
Finally, he used his set-aside time at Walden to clarify his political thinking. For Thoreau, revolution began at home, one person at a time. "We must first succeed alone that we may enjoy our success together," he wrote.
When he left Walden, it was sudden and logical. "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one," he wrote. He was a schoolmaster, private tutor, surveyor, gardener, farmer, painter, carpenter. mason, day laborer, pencil maker, writer, poet, activist, socialist, naturalist, moral philosopher, self exile and utopian community of one.
In his view, purposeful solitude and justice-minded community were codependent, the source of long-term social health. He knew what his view was up against: among other things, America's antsy addiction to distraction and its led-by-the-nose, corporation-fed faith in utopian technology. And the call for civil resistance - individual and collective - that issued from his Walden shelter? It is still hot-to-the-touch. He was not a pacifist. He vehemently supported the armed raid led by the abolitionist John Brown at Harper's Ferry. Surely the Civil War came as no surprise.
Walden is a message of aloneness within solidarity - a message we need to hear these days - in a homely down-to-earth way that Thoreau might support. During this crisis that is isolating us, his work has the potential to bring us together.
When Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," he knew those words spoke a truth about the human condition across the ages. Reading Walden today seems more relevant than ever with its prescription for living authentically and simply in harmony with nature. Thoreau did not use words like "sustainability," but he would have immediately grasped the concept. In fact, he is considered the godfather of the environmental movement. Many modern readers, however, find his prose archaic and his Transcendentalist philosophy equally impenetrable. But, in an age where we have to isolate, it is well worth a second read. Or a third.
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