Introduction: Walden Sesquicentennial Essays (2004)

The essays collected here are implicit tributes to Walden's variety. Each approaches the book from a particular angle, although all point to and unpack versions of the dualism that scholars have identified as its thematic engine. In so doing, the essays all grant authority to the book itself; they neither treat it as a cultural product nor pipe it through one or another uncongenial theoretical container. The split between action and contemplation, the opposition between nature as it is in detail and as it is made to serve the generalizing imagination, the clash between theology and science as these are applied to the natural world, the struggle between materialism and idealism, the use and rejection of literary predecessors, the conflict between wild nature and nature brought under the plow, the desire to transcend earth versus the desire to dig into it, the wish to escape one's body versus the yearning to live fully through one's body, the need to communicate versus the desire to say something never uttered before, the gap between the world and its representation in language--all these concerns so central to Walden are treated with refreshing originality and admirable precision in this collection. ********** Henry David Thoreau's Walden appeared in 1854, 150 years ago. When the untried author built his tiny cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson's wood lot near the shore of Walden Pond--he started building the cabin in Spring 1845, made his official move on July 4 of that year, and stayed for twenty-six months--he had no idea that his contemplated work might ever be widely distributed. The 1854 book addressed itself quite narrowly to you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England concerning your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, by which he meant the town of Concord, Massachusetts. He could not have imagined his chronicle becoming a national treasure capable of delighting, irritating, and inspiring compatriots from Maine to California for well over a century. But, schooled in the Emersonian idea that books exist to inspire their readers, he would have been delighted at the prospect. Walden projects the image of a man withdrawing for a time from frenetic, materialistic, superficial modernity into rejuvenating communion with timeless nature. Thoreau's gesture has been imitated by countless thousands across the nation. The site of his cabin has become a virtual shrine. The book is a repository of memorable phrases, remarkable descriptions, literary allusion, acerbic social criticism that still rings true to American life--perhaps even more now than in its own relatively rustic age. Thoreau moved to the pond to read, think, stroll, perhaps plant a crop (at least one critic thinks his claim to have grown beans was a hoax),0 and launch a literary career by completing two books. The first book would memorialize his beloved older brother John, who had died painfully from tetanus in 1842, by narrating a two weeks' trip the duo made in a home-made boat, paddling down the Concord and Merrimack rivers in 1839. The second would address residents of Concord and its environs, exposing the spiritual poverty of their daily existence as well as the stupidity of their economic arrangements--both understood as the result of their idolizing market capitalism. The critique would be brought home by pointed contrasts between his neighbors' empty lives and his own plenitude at the pond, paradoxically achieved through thoughtful simplification. He needed solitude to write the first book (published in 1849 as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), time and space away from the noise of his father's pencil business and his mother's boarding house. He required a place on the margins of Concord to write the second, where he could watch his neighbors and they could watch him. He needed both distance and proximity. He said (in a sentence used as the caption for Walden's frontispiece--now usually printed as an epigraph): I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up. …