Walden, or taking some time off to think about life in general

Running away once more from the original proposal, I chose to write about a book instead of a blog or website. I decided to analyze Walden - Or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau, because it is a book I have been reading for a couple of months (I have recently checked the date and I started reading it for good on January 9^th 2016, though I thought I had begun to read it months before).

Original title page of Walden, with an illustration by his sister Sophia

Some other readers, such as the ones who often populate Goodreads, would say Walden is a boring book. Fortunately, unlike them, I am pretty much enjoying it. On the contrary, it is a meaningful book and everyone should read, at least, its first chapters, which are the most concise and concentrate a lot of useful information for the purposes of daily life. Anyways, we will be back to this discussion later on this article.

Reproduction of Thoreau's figure and cabin

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He descended from a family of pencil makers and he actually perpetuated this business after accepting that his books would not represent a good market deal. He studied in Harvard College and worked as a teacher and even founded a grammar school with his brother, before investing in his writing. Thoreau's most famous works are Walden and Civil Disobedience. Unlike Civil Disobedience, Walden contains a peaceful narrative and message within. Since it does not approach directly a political point of view, the readers are easily led not to think about its polemic intentions. Even its title, Walden, transports us to an almost mythical landscape, to Nature and quietness. From the middle of the book until the conclusion chapter, we get mostly in touch with careful, microscopic descriptions about Walden pond and its surroundings, none of them clearly related to societal issues. Only Nature, Nature, Nature. Animals. Eventual human neighbors (such as farmers). Hunting. Fishing.

In fact - let's go back to my analysis - Thoreau lived near the Walden pond for 2 years, 2 months and 2 days (between 1845 and 1847), in a cabin built by himself. During this time, he grew food, apart from hunting and fishing. He also chose to wear practical clothes, made from inexpensive fabric.

While reading Walden, it may seem that Thoreau had isolated himself completely from society. However, he was only two miles away from Concord city center and his family house, a distance which would take him forty minutes walking. The most striking aspect about Thoreau living in the middle of the forest is not his isolation itself, nor the description of Walden pond, what is remarkable is the project that is intended by spending two years outside the city. This is the reason why the first two chapters are the ones to be read by everyone. They have a strong practical component and a great message concerning economical resources (at a national, but also at a personal/domestic level) and natural resources too - and the titles they were given do not lie: "Economy" and "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For".

Living these two years not participating in city life, Thoreau challenged himself to survive not depending on anything that he could live without, such as money and all the comforts that would come along with it (expensive clothes, prepared meat or a rented house). He wished to prove himself, maybe his fellow citizens and obviously his audience of readers that it is possible for one to live stripped of superfluous material and food goods. According to him, "I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food [...]." Of all the sentences I could possible quote from Walden's 360 pages, I think this one is the most surprising and succinct when it comes to describe Thoreau's lifestyle. In short: the less we eat, the less we work; the less we work, the less we eat. If we do not need much, we do not have to work more in order to afford those goods.

Thoreau’s social experiment is an expression of the Transcendentalist philosophical movement,  which dictates that individuals are corrupted by society and its institutions, therefore having the need to isolate themselves to become good, pure and rediscover their relationship with Nature again (to transcend themselves). Through his personal experience, he wished to reaffirm his personal independence, to reflect on people's behaviour and their mentality. This way, Walden, Or Life in the Woods is more than a personal diary or autobiography; it is a social satire and a voyage of self-discovery.

Unfortunately, on the one hand, Thoreau only sold 2000 copies of Walden until his death, in 1862, in spite of the positive reviews he obtained. His avant-garde ideas labelled him as an eccentric and misanthropic. On the other hand, Walden and Civil Disobedience became references to some of the most iconic movements in the 20^th century, inspiring Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the hippie ideology. Even in the 21^st century, his work still has a say about capitalism, sustainability of resources and human and material ecology, topics that are especially debated in the United States of America.

In 1996, Jon Krakauer wrote Christopher McCandless's biography, later adapted to cinema in 2007. Into the Wild tells the journey McCandless took in the early ‘90s to Alaska. Thoreau’s Walden is appointed as one of the major inspirations to McCandless’s journey, but it is easy to understand that some of the reasons why he began it represented a dangerous trigger (for instance, emotional instability and family issues). Thoreau also suffered because of his brother’s death and a broken engagement due to financial and social differences between his family and her fiancée’s, but he actually channelled this sadness to a feasible project, staying permanently in one place, close to the city, while McCandless chose a radical alternative of exploring the road recklessly and cutting off almost all of his bonds with human society.

As a quick remark, regarding Portuguese authors, Eça de Queirós also deals with the disappointment one would feel about city life and the need to go back to the country side, at the end of the 19^th century (only some decades after Thoreau’s time) in his book The City and the Mountains. I almost feel that this is not a coincidence and that the influence of Transcendentalism may have reached Portugal as well, only later and less evidently than other artistic and philosophical movements.

In summary, Walden may be a challenging book for people who are not used to long descriptions, non-stop introspection and reflection or few interaction between the narrator/protagonist and other characters, but it is an enriching book as it tells a once in a thousand lifetimes experience, and its mission and results continue to be applicable to contemporaneity, somehow. I guess it is worth the try.