Hollis
Walking to the auditorium where I am to lecture on Thoreau I pass
Hollis Hall in which he lived as an undergraduate.

I think we can understand why on graduation he changed his name --
David Henry became Henry David, preemptorily. Like Emerson before him
he was a scholarship student. During his first year he had one coat --
his mother and aunt had made it for him out of green homespun. That
year the right students were wearing black. All his life he railed
with particular passion against any discrimination that is based on dress.
A classmate tells us that, as a student, Thoreau in conversation did not
raise his eyes from the ground and that his hands were continually moist.
We can understand that. He was in deep discomfort. The life at college is a very rigorous one and Thoreau was not a man who liked to be discomforted. The classmate was a man.
That chapter over, he changed his name.

As I pass Hollis I become uncomfortable; I feel those extraordinary
blue eyes not on me, but directed over me, in that reproachless way. He set
down a portrait of himself and he took pains with its details. He wished it
to be known that he was direct, simple, forthright, candid, and uncomplicated. Many have taken him at his word; but no, his life and personality have more important things to tell us.

How hard it is to discuss Thoreau in the presence of the young.
Many aspects of his life and thought lie in that sole territory which
is inaccessible to young men and women. I never feel an incomprehension
on their part when I treat of death or loss or passion; their imagina-
tion can extend themselves -- by that principle which Goethe called
"anticipation" -- to such matters. What is difficult is to treat of the
slow attrition of the soul by the conduct of life, our recognition with the
oppressed and the false, the background of such works as LE MISANTHROPE and DON
QUIOTE. I must tell these young people, who are hurrying by me, that
Thoreau met defeat in his impassioned demands upon Love, Friendship, and
Nature; and yet I must tell them that at the same time he was an American
who fought some of our battles for us, whose experience we are to follow

2.

with a sort of anxious suspense. The rewards we obtain from the con-
templation of Thoreau, however, begin their consolatory and inspiriting
effect upon us as we move through our forties.

I wish I were somewhere else.

Ladies and gentlemen:

We were talking last time about how difficult
it is to be an American. We spoke of the support which Europeans re-
ceive from all those elements we call environment, -- place, tradition,
customs: "I am I because my neighbors know me." Their environment is so
thickly woven, so solid, that the growing boy and girl have something to
kick against. The American, on the other hand, is at sea -- disconnect-
ed from place, distantful of authority, thrown back upon himself.

It is past, very supporting, to have something concrete to hold on.

Here I am again.

And suddenly, as my eyes rest on the upturned faces before me,
I am encouraged. It is in many ways a sad story I have to tell. When-
ever I think of Thoreau I feel a weight about my heart, a greater
weight than descends in thoughts of Poe or Emily Dickinson. Yet all of
us here are Americans. My subject is the loneliness that accompanies
independence and the uneasiness that accompanies freedom. These exper-
iences are not foreign to anyone here. So forward:

*insert*

Perceptive visitors to America from Europe are uniformly
struck by what they call "American loneliness" which they find no
less present in that fretful and uncertain hollow gregariousness we talked
about last time.

Now there are several forms of this loneliness and the one
that occurs to us first is the sentimental form. In America the very
word is sentimental and it makes us uncomfortable even to employ it. Yet
we see this kind of loneliness about us everywhere; like the loneliness
which springs from pride it is a consequence, a deformation, and a ma-
lady of that deeper form which we are about to discuss. Both proceed
from the fact that the religious ideas current in America are still in-
adequate to explain the American to himself; the sentimental loneli-
ness arises from the sense that he is a victim, that he was sleighted

3.

when fortune distributed her gifts ( though it is notably prevalent among those who seem to "have everything" ); the proud loneliness arises from that sense of boundlessness which we described as related to the American geography and is found among those who make boundless moral demands on themselves and others.

Thoreau illustrates certain American traits connected with loneliness in an extreme and exaggerated form. He finally lost his battle -- the typical American battle of trying to convert a loneliness into an enriched and fruitful solitude -- but before he died (at forty-life, murmuring: "It is better some things should end") he furnished us many a bulletin of the struggle, many an insight, and many an aid.

Another of the most famous pages in American literature is that wherein Thoreau gives his reasons for going to live in solitude at Walden Pond.

"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... I did not practice resignation, unless it were quite necessary... if [life] proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meaning of it, and publish its meaning to the world; if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Thoreau's books are a sort of cento of transcriptions and amplifications of entries in his Journals. Here is what he wrote on the second day of his residence at the pond (July 6, 1845):

July 6, 1845:

"I wish to meet the facts of life -- the vital facts, which are the phenomena or, which the Gods meant to show us -- face to face, and so I came here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does?"

There are several things to notice about these lives, among them, first, that he will put his question as though no one had ever said anything valuable before, and, second, that it is best to ask what life is, it is necessary to remove oneself from the human community.

Americans constantly feel that the whole world's thinking has to be done over again. They did not only leave the Old World, they repudiated it. Americans start from scratch. This is revolt indeed, all authority is suspect, and this is boundless perusalion.

doors --doors to great areas of experience on which he counted for all
and illumination, the doors to Love, Friendship, and Nature.

Here are the reverberations of these closing doors.

LOVE: (October 27, 1851, aged 34): "The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot remove. She who was the morning light is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder...."

FRIENDSHIP: (March 4, 1856, aged 38): "I had two friends. The one offered me friendship on such terms that I could not accept it, without a sense of degradation. He would not meet me on equal terms, but only to be to some extent my patron.... Our relation was one long tragedy.... The other....."

NATURE: As early as July 16, 1851 Thoreau was saying: "Methinks my present experience is nothing; my past experience is all in all. I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood..... Formerly, methought, nature developed as I developed, and I grew up with me. My life was ecstacy....."

The story of Thoreau's love is only beginning to be pieced together. The obstacles that separated him from this woman were indeed granite blocks. The expressions he gives to his love in his Journal, are often strange "whirling words": "My sister, it is glorious to me that you live!..... At this morning when I meet thee in a still cool dewy white sun light in the hushed dawn -- my young mother -- I thy eldest son" (litly crossed through: "thy young father")......whether art though my mother or my sister -- whether am I thy son or they brother......Others are of my kindred by blood or of my acquaintance but you are part of me. I cannot tell where you leave off and I begin." In another passage, Journal 1850, he says: "I am as much thy sister as thy brother. Thou art as much my brother as my sister."

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was quoted before 'an interrupted nap' we have reason to be surprised that the erotic emotion expresses itself in images borrowed from the family relationships. Yet such a coloring is present elsewhere in our writers of this period, in Whitman, in Melville (PIERRE), and in Poe. In America the family is the nexus of an unusually powerful ambivalence. On the one hand, the child strains to break away and lead his own life. The young seldom settle down near their parents' home; less and less frequently do the parents end their days in the homes of their children; I have remarked that young people are increasingly eager for the moment when they are no longer financially dependent on their parents. On the other hand, the American -- as we were saying -- is exceptionally aware of the multitude of the human race; his loneliness is enhanced by his consciousness of those numbers. The family is at once an encroachment on his individualism and a seductive invitation to rejoin the human community at a level where he does not feel himself to be strange. Moreover, individualism has its arrogance. It has long been a tag that every American is king. Royalty marries only royalty. Other people aren't good enough. Thoreau elevates the woman he loves to this kinship. Poe's mother died when he was three; he lived the latter part of his life with his aunt and married his cousin. The blocks of concrete which separated Thoreau from this "sister" were not all outside of him. The door of love closed and he never returned to it.

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Individualism! It is the point of honor of men and nations in this century. Every nation boasts that it is a nation of individualists and implies that the other nations are composed of sheep. ("You Americans -- you all eat the same things; you repeat the same slogans; you read the same book in the month; the very streets in which you live have not even names, but merely numbers and letters!") Yet no man (and no nation) is as individualistic as he thinks he is; each is so in one area of his existence and the extent to which he is -- fortunately! -- conformist in others is not apparent to him. Friendship is not incompatible with individualism, as the great pages of Montaigne have shown us, but it was incompatible in the lives of our Concord philosophers. Thousands of school-children were formerly required to read Emerson's chaotic essay on the subject. For generations Emerson's style had the power to put the judgement to sleep, but one wonders what the teachers made of that farewell address to "our dearest friends": "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more."

Thoreau's inability to come to terms with friendship was aggravated by the vastness of his expectations. To this day many an American is breaking his life on an excessive demand for the perfect, the absolute, and the boundless in realms where it is accorded to few, -- in love and friendship, for example. The doctrines of moderation and the golden mean may have flourished in Rome and in China (overcrowded and overgoverned countries), but they do not flourish here, save as counsels of despair. The injunction to be content with your lot and in the situation where God has placed you are not expressions of New World thinking. We do not feel ourselves to be subject to lot and we do not cast God in the role of a civil administrator or of a federal baron.

10.

sense of time which I shall develope later. Time is something we create,
we call into being, not something we submit to -- an order outside us.

Similarly, these are aspects of Thoreau's relation to nature that
are not those we feel to be prevalent elsewhere among us. The gods of
glad and brook and pond are not the gods of plain, seacoast, forest, de-
sert, and mountain. The former are almost in reach‡ one can imagine one-
self in dialogue with them; they can enter into an almost personal re-
lation with those who have turned from the company of men. But the gods
of great space are enigmatic; we are never sure that we have read aright
the message of their beauty and terror; we do not hastily put words in-
to their mouths. Yet the more we feel an "otherness" in nature, the
more we recognize that we ourselves are natural. "It appears to be a
law," wrote Thoreau, in April, 1852, "that you cannot have a deep sym-
pathy with both man and nature." "I loved nature because she is not man,
but a retreat from him." There is no such law, nor have any other Amer-
ican voices expressed any sentiment like it, unless we take note of a
moment in Emily Dickinson's life when she wrote, "I thought that nature
was enough ‡ill human nature came." Nature failed Thoreau, as it will
ultimately rail anyone who wishes to divide it up, to pick and choose
only limited congenial aspects of it, for exstacy or for retreat, or
who wishes to employ one aspect of it to confound another.

And the question: "Life! Who knows what it is, what it does?"
It would seem that Thoreau had considerably compromised his inquiry
by divesting himself of the testimony and the companionship of others
and by repeating his question to a wooded vale. Yet millions have testi-
fied and are testifying to the powerful clarifications he brought back
from Walden Pond. And all his triumphs came from his embattled individ-
ualism, from pushing it to the limits that border on absurdity, and
from facing -- "face to face" -- the loneliness consequent upon it. He
came back with the answer that life, thought, culture, religion, govern-
ment -- everything arises from subjectivity, from inwardness. Our sole
self is the first and last judge of values, including the values of com-
munal life.

I have traced briefly the long gradual millenary
convergence of emphasis on the individual, --
Religion's, government's, arts; and showed