In one line
Henry David Thoreau was a New England writer who tested Emerson's ideas by living them. Walden (1854) is his account of two years of simple living by a pond, and his essay on "Civil Disobedience" (1849) argued that conscience outranks law, an idea that later reached Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The life
He was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1817, and later reversed his first names. His father ran a small pencil-making business; the family was not wealthy but scraped together enough to send Henry to Harvard, where he graduated in 1837. He came home to teach at the Concord public school, and quit within weeks rather than flog his pupils, as the school committee expected. He and his older brother John then ran their own small school, known for nature walks and hands-on lessons, until John's health failed.
In 1839 the brothers took a two-week boat trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. In January 1842 John cut his finger while shaving, contracted tetanus, and died in Henry's arms. Henry developed sympathetic symptoms of lockjaw himself. The grief stayed with him for years, and his first book became a memorial to that river journey.
By then Thoreau had fallen into the orbit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, fourteen years older, who lived in Concord and encouraged him to keep a journal. Thoreau did, from 1837 until shortly before his death; it grew to some two million words. He lived in Emerson's household for stretches as a handyman and companion, wrote for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, and in 1843 tutored the children of Emerson's brother on Staten Island, a short, unhappy stay that taught him he belonged in Concord.
On 4 July 1845, at twenty-seven, he moved into a one-room cabin he had built himself on land Emerson owned beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from the village. He itemized the costs, $28.12½. He planted beans, read, wrote, walked, studied the pond, and received visitors. He was not a hermit; he walked into town often and ate at his family's table. He stayed two years, two months and two days, leaving on 6 September 1847, because, as he wrote, he had several more lives to live.
During that time, in July 1846, he was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax, a protest against a government that supported slavery and was waging war on Mexico. He spent one night in jail; someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax against his wishes, and he was released the next morning. He went straight off to pick huckleberries. He turned the experience into a lecture, published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government," later known as "Civil Disobedience."
His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), sold so poorly that in 1853 the publisher returned the unsold copies. In his journal he joked that he now had a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which he had written himself. He spent years revising the Walden manuscript, through seven drafts, and Walden; or, Life in the Woods finally appeared in 1854. It sold modestly.
He earned his living as a land surveyor, as a lecturer and in the family pencil business, where he improved the product. He made long trips to the Maine woods and walked the outer beaches of Cape Cod. He became an ever more serious naturalist, recording the dates on which plants bloomed and birds arrived, and his records are now used by scientists studying climate change in Concord.
He grew fiercely outspoken against slavery. His family's home was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and he helped people escaping slavery reach Canada. In 1854 he gave the speech "Slavery in Massachusetts." In 1859, when almost everyone condemned John Brown after the raid on Harpers Ferry, Thoreau defended him in "A Plea for Captain John Brown."
Tuberculosis, which had stalked his family, took hold in 1860 after he caught a cold counting tree rings in the snow. He died at home on 6 May 1862, aged forty-four. Asked near the end whether he had made his peace with God, he is reported to have said he did not know they had ever quarreled. Emerson gave the eulogy. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod were published after his death.
The big ideas
Live deliberately
The heart of Walden, in his own words: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." The experiment was a question: how much of what we chase do we actually need?
Simplicity
"Our life is frittered away by detail," he wrote. He begins Walden with a chapter called "Economy," an actual accounting of his costs, to show that most people trade their lives for things they don't need. "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
Quiet desperation
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." The line is often quoted as gloom. In context it is a provocation: the despair is "quiet" because people accept it as normal. Thoreau's book is the argument that it is not necessary.
A different drummer
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." This is self-reliance made into a walking pace.
Conscience over law
"Civil Disobedience" argues that a person should not let the state override his conscience. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Thoreau's resistance was nonviolent and open; he went to jail rather than hide.
Wildness
In his late lecture "Walking," published in 1862, he wrote: "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." Nature was not a resource to him but a necessity for the human spirit, an idea that runs straight to the modern conservation movement.
What their lines mean for you
At work. The "Economy" chapter is a challenge to count the real price of things in hours of your life. Thoreau was no idler; he worked as a surveyor, lecturer and craftsman. He just refused to let work eat everything.
In training. Thoreau walked four hours a day and more, in all weather, and kept his journal daily for twenty-five years. Walden went through seven drafts. Discipline is the quiet engine of his freedom.
In grief. The loss of John shaped his whole life. His first book was a memorial to a trip with his brother. Grief, for Thoreau, became attention: a reason to look harder at the world that remained.
In anger. Thoreau was angry at injustice, and he used it: in a night in jail, an essay, a speech for John Brown. His anger had a target and a method.
On the ocean. In Cape Cod he walked the great outer beach, watching the Atlantic and the wrecks it left. Of that shore he wrote: "It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it." The sea, for him, was nature at its least concerned with us, and worth facing for exactly that reason. Walden itself he called "earth's eye," a pond so clear you could see the bottom at thirty feet.
With ambition. The Conclusion of Walden: "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." His idea of success was not money. It was a life that matched your real hopes.
Where people get them wrong
- "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." A popular rewrite. The original, quoted above, is longer and conditional: it's a promise about what happens if you advance and endeavor.
- "Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Widely credited to Thoreau. It has not been found in his writings.
- "That government is best which governs least." Thoreau quotes this as an existing motto at the opening of "Civil Disobedience," then pushes further. It was associated with John L. O'Sullivan's Democratic Review in the 1830s. It was not his coinage.
- Thoreau lived in the wilderness, alone. Walden was a mile and a half from town, near a railroad line. He had frequent visitors and walked home often. He never claimed otherwise; Walden has a chapter called "Visitors."
- His mother did his laundry, so the experiment was a fraud. He did visit home and eat there, and that's in the record. The point of Walden was never total self-sufficiency. It was an experiment in simplicity and attention.
- Thoreau was a hermit who hated people. He had close friends, taught children, lectured, surveyed his neighbors' land, and helped people escaping slavery.
Read them yourself
- Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Project Gutenberg #205
- On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: Project Gutenberg #71
- Cape Cod, The Maine Woods, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and essays including "Walking": Project Gutenberg search
- Thoreau's works on Wikisource: en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Henry_David_Thoreau
All quotations in this essay are Thoreau's own published words, which are in the public domain.
Timeline
- 1817: born in Concord on 12 July
- 1837: graduates from Harvard; begins his journal
- 1838 to 1841: runs a school with his brother John
- 1839: the boat trip on the Concord and Merrimack rivers
- 1842: John dies of tetanus
- 1845: moves into his cabin at Walden Pond on 4 July
- 1846: spends a night in jail for refusing to pay the poll tax
- 1847: leaves Walden on 6 September
- 1849: publishes A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and "Resistance to Civil Government"
- 1849 to 1857: walks the beaches of Cape Cod on several trips
- 1854: publishes Walden; speaks on "Slavery in Massachusetts"
- 1859: delivers "A Plea for Captain John Brown"
- 1860: falls ill with tuberculosis
- 1862: dies in Concord on 6 May; "Walking" is published
- 1864 to 1865: The Maine Woods and Cape Cod are published posthumously