하늘을 그리는 사람들 퇴계ㆍ다산ㆍ동학의 하늘철학, 조성환 저

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하늘을 그리는 사람들
퇴계ㆍ다산ㆍ동학의 하늘철학조성환 저 | 소나무 | 2022년 01월 25일

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국내도서 > 인문 > 한국철학 > 한국철학의 이해/한국철학사

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책소개
이 책은 ‘하늘(天)’ 관념을 중심으로 한국사상의 특징을 고찰하고자 하는 사상사적 시론이다. 이 시론은 종래의 한국사상사 기술이 중국사상사라는 거대한 숲에 가려져 그 독자적인 특징을 드러내는 데 소홀해 있었다는 문제의식에서 출발한다. 흔히 조선사상사는 중국 주자학의 수용과 전개라는 구도로 서술되곤 한다. 그래서 주자학의 용어를 원용한 ‘주리론-주기론’이라는 다카하시 도오류식의 분석틀을 사용하거나, ‘중국성리학의 조선화’라는 유학사의 맥락에서 기술되어 온 것이 대부분이다.

그러나 이러한 관점을 접하면서 드는 의문은 “만약에 그것이 전부라고 한다면 굳이 ‘한국철학’이라는 말을 쓸 필요가 있을까?”라는 것이다. 단지 그것이 한국 땅에서 벌어진 현상이기 때문에 ‘한국’이라는 수식어를 붙이는 것이라면, 그냥 ‘동아시아유학사’ 내지는 ‘조선유학사’라고 해도 무방하지 않을까? 이러한 의문의 근저에는 “과연 한국철학과 중국철학의 근본적인 차이는 무엇인가?”라는 대단히 본질적이며 상식적인 물음이 깔려 있다. 과연 둘 사이에는 근본적인 차이가 있는 것일까? 있다면 그것은 구체적으로 무엇인가? 그리고 그것은 왜 지금까지 무시되어 왔는가? 이러한 물음들이 이 책을 기획하게 된 기본적인 동기다.

책의 일부 내용을 미리 읽어보실 수 있습니다. 미리보기

목차
서문 _ 한국학 어떻게 할 것인가?

I. 도학에서 천학으로

1. 한국철학의 특징을 찾아서
2. 동방의 제천의례 논쟁
3. ‘천학’이라는 범주
4. 이 책의 구성

II. 조선의 하늘철학

1. 한국인의 하늘사랑
하늘축제
하늘경험
‘하?’의 탄생
역사 속의 하느님
2. 조선정치와 하늘철학
경건함으로 다스려라
하늘님을 대하듯 하라
하늘을 참되게 대하라
3. 퇴계의 하늘철학
성인에 대한 믿음
하늘에 대한 효도
리(理)와의 감응
다카하시 스스무 학설 비판
4. 퇴계 이후의 하늘철학
윤휴의 사천유학(事天儒學)
다산의 상제유학(上帝儒學)
실심(實心)과 천학
5. 동학에서 ‘천교’로의 전환
천교(天敎)의 등장
천도(天道)의 탄생
천도와 천교
천인(天人)과 시민(侍民)
하늘의 개별화와 일상화

III. 한국사상의 풍토와 한국인의 영성

참고문헌
주석
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저자 소개 (1명)
저 : 조성환

원광대학교 동북아시아인문사회연구소 HK교수. [다시개벽] 편집인. 지구지역학 연구자. 서강대와 와세다대학에서 동양철학을 공부하였고, 원광대학교 원불교사상연구원에서 『한국 근대의 탄생』과 『개벽파선언』(이병한과 공저)을 저술하였다. 20∼30대에는 노장사상에 끌려 중국철학을 공부하였고, 40대부터는 한국학에 눈을 떠 동학과 개벽사상을 연구하였다. 최근에는 1990년대부터 서양에서 대두되기 시작한 ‘지구인문학’에 관...
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출판사 리뷰
한국철학의 정체는 무엇인가

이 책은 ‘하늘(天)’ 관념을 중심으로 한국사상의 특징을 고찰하고자 하는 사상사적 시론이다. 이 시론은 종래의 한국사상사 기술이 중국사상사라는 거대한 숲에 가려져 그 독자적인 특징을 드러내는 데 소홀해 있었다는 문제의식에서 출발한다. 흔히 조선사상사는 중국 주자학의 수용과 전개라는 구도로 서술되곤 한다. 그래서 주자학의 용어를 원용한 ‘주리론-주기론’이라는 다카하시 도오류식의 분석틀을 사용하거나, ‘중국성리학의 조선화’라는 유학사의 맥락에서 기술되어 온 것이 대부분이다.

그러나 이러한 관점을 접하면서 드는 의문은 “만약에 그것이 전부라고 한다면 굳이 ‘한국철학’이라는 말을 쓸 필요가 있을까?”라는 것이다. 단지 그것이 한국 땅에서 벌어진 현상이기 때문에 ‘한국’이라는 수식어를 붙이는 것이라면, 그냥 ‘동아시아유학사’ 내지는 ‘조선유학사’라고 해도 무방하지 않을까? 이러한 의문의 근저에는 “과연 한국철학과 중국철학의 근본적인 차이는 무엇인가?”라는 대단히 본질적이며 상식적인 물음이 깔려 있다. 과연 둘 사이에는 근본적인 차이가 있는 것일까? 있다면 그것은 구체적으로 무엇인가? 그리고 그것은 왜 지금까지 무시되어 왔는가? 이러한 물음들이 이 책을 기획하게 된 기본적인 동기다.

“일반적으로 한국철학이라고 하면 전부 중국철학에서 기원한 것으로 생각하기 마련이다. 실제로 고려시대의 불교와 조선시대의 유교는 전부 중국에서 수용된 것이다. 퇴계가 사용하는 개념이나 표현도 전부 중국의 주자에서 찾을 수 있다. 그러나 이렇게 치부해버리고 말면 ‘사상사’를 서술할 수 없게 된다. … 똑같은 개념을 써도 함의가 같을 수는 없다. 유학의 천(天)과 동학의 천(天)이 같을 수 없고, 주자의 리(理)와 퇴계의 리(理)가 동일할 리가 없다. 이러한 차이를 밝히는 작업이야말로 ‘한국사상사’ 서술의 관건이다. 그래서 이 책은 한국사상사 서술방법론에 관한 사례연구일 뿐만 아니라, 한국철학의 정체성을 밝히는 시론이기도 하다.” (13쪽)

“우리는 주자나 양명이 아닌 퇴계나 다산이 딛고 서 있는 사상적 풍토에서 출발해야 한다. 이런 작업이야말로 ‘사상사’의 본령에 해당한다. 그리고 그 결정적 힌트는 유학이라는 틀을 벗어난 동학이 제공한다. 동학은 주자학이라는 중국적 사유가 그 시효를 다한 상태에서 드러난 한국적 사유의 표출이다. … 그래서 우리가 “한국사상사를 어떻게 볼 것인가?”라는 문제를 생각할 때에는 먼저 ‘유학’이라는 틀에서 벗어나야 한다. 한국사상은 “중국의 영향이 전부”이고 “유학이 전부”라고 생각하는 이상 한국사상의 특징은 포착하기 어렵고, 따라서 한국사상사의 서술은 점점 어려워진다. ‘유학’이라는 틀을 벗어나서 조선유학을 바라보지 않는 이상, 조선유학의 특징도 잡아내기 어렵고 동학으로 이어지는 흐름도 놓치게 된다.” (215~216쪽)

우리에게 ‘하늘’이란 무엇인가

이러한 물음에 접근하는 하나의 단서로서 필자가 주목한 사상은 ‘동학’이다. 동학은 조선성리학이 그 효력을 다해갈 무렵인 조선말기에 한반도라는 한정된 공간에서 자생적으로 등장한 주체적인 사상이었다. 동학의 창시자 최제우는 자신의 사상을 유도(儒道)나 불도(佛道)와 대비하여 ‘천도(天道)’라 명명하고, ‘하늘’을 중심으로 하는 동방(한국)의 세계관(道)은 생명과 평등 그리고 존엄이라는 새로운 시대의 보편적인 가치를 지향한다고 선언했다. 인간은 신분에 상관없이 누구나 우주적 생명력인 ‘하늘님’을 모시고 있기 때문에 동등하게 존중받고 보호받아야 한다는 것이다.

동학이 자신의 사상체계를 ‘하늘’을 중심으로 전개한 것과 대조적으로, 이웃나라 일본에서는 탈아입구로 대변되는 서구화와 더불어 사상언어로서의 하늘 관념은 사어(死語)가 되고 있었다. 마찬가지로 중국철학 역시 선진시대 이래로 ‘천(天)’에서 ‘도(道)’로(제자백가), ‘도(道)’에서 다시 ‘리(理)’로(신유학), 그리고 ‘리(理)’에서 다시 ‘기(氣)’로(청대실학), 그 진행이 점점 ‘하늘’의 초월성이 약화되는 방향으로 전개되어 갔다. 이렇게 보면 동학의 탄생은 동아시아 사상사에서는 하나의 ‘사상사적 역행’이라고 할 수 있을 것이다.

그렇다면 우리는 이러한 특이한 현상에 대해 과연 어떠한 사상사적 설명을 제시할 수 있을 것인가? 이것이 이 책이 해결하고자 하는 하나의 과제다. 그리고 이 과제는 처음에 제기했던 중국철학과는 다른 한국적인 철학이 과연 무엇인지, 그런 것이 있기나 하는지라는 문제와도 맞닿아 있다. 이 두 가지 물음, 즉 동학의 탄생에 대한 사상사적 설명, 그리고 한국철학의 특징 찾기를 위해 필자는 ‘하늘철학’을 제시한다.

“고대 한반도인들은 황제나 임금이 아닌데도 불구하고 ‘누구나’ 하늘을 향해 제사를 지내고 축제를 벌였다. 그것도 개별적이 아니라 집단적으로, 개인적이 아니라 공공적으로 거행하였다. 이 책에서는 “하늘을 그리다”라고 명명하였다. 여기에서 ‘그리다’는 ‘그리워하다[思]’와 ‘그리다[描]’의 이중적 의미를 담고 있다. 한국인들은 전통적으로 하늘을 그리워하고 두려워하며, 마음속에 그리고 언설로 표출하였다.” (12쪽)

Why Do We Love Henry David Thoreau? | The New Yorker

Why Do We Love Henry David Thoreau? | The New Yorker



The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau
Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish “Walden”?



By Kathryn SchulzOctober 12, 2015


On the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished?Illustration by Eric Nyquist

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin.

The visitor from Concord, surveying all this, found himself unmoved. “On the whole,” he wrote, “it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity?” This impassive witness also had stern words for those who, undone by the tragedy, could no longer enjoy strolling along the beach. Surely, he admonished, “its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.”

Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm? This was Henry David Thoreau, that great partisan of the pond, describing his visit to Cohasset in “Cape Cod.” That book is not particularly well known today, but if Thoreau’s chilly tone in it seems surprising, it is because, in a curious way, “Walden” is not well known, either. Like many canonized works, it is more revered than read, so it exists for most people only as a dim impression retained from adolescence or as the source of a few famous lines: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

Extracted from their contexts, such declarations read like the text on inspirational posters or quote-a-day calendars—purposes to which they are routinely put. Together with the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become simplified and inspirational. In that image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature.

This vision cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.” The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau, in 1817, the third of four children of a pencil manufacturer in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1833, he went off to Harvard, which he did not particularly like and where he was not found particularly likable. (One classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction,” like a man “preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.”) After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher, then helped run a school until its co-director, his older brother John, died of tetanus. That was the end of Thoreau’s experiments in pedagogy, except perhaps on the page. On and off from then until his own death (at forty-four, of tuberculosis), he worked as a surveyor and in the family pencil factory.

Meanwhile, however, Thoreau had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fellow Concord resident fourteen years his senior. Intellectually as well as practically, Emerson’s influence on Thoreau was enormous. He introduced the younger man to transcendentalism, steered him toward writing, employed him as a jack-of-all-trades and live-in tutor to his children, and lent him the pond-side land where Thoreau went to live on July 4, 1845. Thoreau spent two years at Walden but nearly ten years writing “Walden,” which was published, in 1854, to middling critical and popular acclaim; it took five more years for the initial print run, of two thousand copies, to sell out. Only after Thoreau’s death, in 1862, and thanks to vigorous championing by his family members, Emerson, and later readers, did “Walden” become a cornerstone work of American nonfiction and its author an American hero.



Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.


As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.


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“Walden,” in consequence, is not a paean to living simply; it is a paean to living purely, with all the moral judgment that the word implies. In its first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau lays out a program of abstinence so thoroughgoing as to make the Dalai Lama look like a Kardashian. (That chapter must be one of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than eighty pages long.) Thoreau, who never wed, regarded “sensuality” as a dangerous contaminant, by which we “stain and pollute one another.” He did not smoke and avoided eating meat. He shunned alcohol, although with scarcely more horror than he shunned every beverage except water: “Think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them!” Such temptations, along with the dangerous intoxicant that is music, had, he felt, caused the fall of Greece and Rome.

I cannot idolize anyone who opposes coffee (especially if the objection is that it erodes great civilizations; had the man not heard of the Enlightenment?), but Thoreau never met an appetite too innocuous to denounce. He condemned those who gathered cranberries for jam (“So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass”) and regarded salt as “that grossest of groceries”; if he did without it, he boasted, he could also drink less water. He advised his readers to eat just one meal a day, partly to avoid having to earn additional money for food but also because the act of eating bordered, for him, on an ethical transgression. “The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites,” he wrote, as if our appetites were otherwise disgraceful. No slouch at public shaming, Thoreau did his part to sustain that irrational equation, so robust in America, between eating habits and moral worth.

Food was bad, drink was bad, even shelter was suspect, and Thoreau advised keeping it to a minimum. “I used to see a large box by the railroad,” he wrote in “Walden,” “six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night”: drill a few airholes, he argued, and one of these would make a fine home. (“I am far from jesting,” he added, unnecessarily. Thoreau regarded humor as he regarded salt, and did without.) He chose to live in a somewhat larger box at Walden, but austerity prevailed there, too. He eschewed curtains and recoiled in dismay from the idea of a doormat: “As I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

I am not aware of any theology which holds that the road to Hell is paved with doormats, but Thoreau, in fine Puritan fashion, saw the beginnings of evil everywhere. He contemplated gathering the wild herbs around Walden to sell in Concord but concluded that “I should probably be on my way to the devil.” He permitted himself to plant beans, but cautiously, calling it “a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.” Only those with no sense of balance must live in so much fear of the slippery slope. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing about Thoreau in 1880, pointed out that when a man must “abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself.”

To abstain, Stevenson understood, is not necessarily to simplify; restrictions and repudiations can just as easily complicate one’s life. (Try going out to dinner with a vegan who is avoiding gluten.) But worse than Thoreau’s radical self-denial is his denial of others. The most telling thing he purports to abstain from while at Walden is companionship, which he regards as at best a time-consuming annoyance, at worst a threat to his mortal soul. For Thoreau, in other words, his fellow-humans had the same moral status as doormats.

No feature of the natural landscape is more humble than a pond, but, on the evidence of Thoreau, the quality is not contagious. He despised his admirers, toward whom, Emerson wrote, he “was never affectionate, but superior, didactic,—scorning their petty ways.” He disdained his ostensible friends, once responding to a social invitation with the words “such are my engagements to myself, that I dare not promise.” (The italics are his.) And he looked down on his entire town. “What does our Concord culture amount to?” he asked in “Walden.” “Our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.”

This comprehensive arrogance is captured in one of Thoreau’s most famous lines: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It is a mystery to me how a claim so simultaneously insufferable and absurd ever entered the canon of popular quotations. Had Thoreau broadened it to include himself, it would be less obnoxious; had he broadened it to include everyone (à la Sartre), it would be more defensible. As it stands, however, Thoreau’s declaration is at once off-putting and empirically dubious. By what method, one wonders, could a man so disinclined to get to know other people substantiate an allegation about the majority of humanity?

By none, of course; Thoreau could not have been less interested in how the mass of men actually lived. On the contrary, he was as parochial as he was egotistical. (He once claimed that Massachusetts contained almost all the important plants in America, and, after reading the explorer Elisha Kane’s best-selling 1856 account of his Arctic journey, remarked that “most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.”) His attitude toward Europe “almost reached contempt,” Emerson wrote, while “the other side of the globe” was, in Thoreau’s words, “barbarous and unhealthy.” Making a virtue of his incuriosity, he discouraged the reading of newspapers. “I am sure,” he wrote in “Walden,” “that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper,” not least because “nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts.” In that sweeping claim, he explicitly included the French Revolution.


Unsurprisingly, this thoroughgoing misanthrope did not care to help other people. “I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises,” Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” He had “tried it fairly” and was “satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.” Nor did spontaneous generosity: “I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests.” In what is by now a grand American tradition, Thoreau justified his own parsimony by impugning the needy. “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it.” Thinking of that state of affairs, Thoreau writes, “I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him.”

The poor, the rich, his neighbors, his admirers, strangers: Thoreau’s antipathy toward humanity even encompassed the very idea of civilization. In his journals, he laments the archeological wealth of Great Britain and gives thanks that in New England “we have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization.” That is patently untrue, but it is also telling: for Thoreau, civilization was a contaminant. “Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries,” he wrote in “Walden.” “The soil is blanched and accursed there.” Seen by these lights, Thoreau’s retreat at Walden was a desperate compromise. What he really wanted was to be Adam, before Eve—to be the first human, unsullied, utterly alone in his Eden.

There is a striking exception to Thoreau’s indifference to the rest of humanity, and he is rightly famous for it. An outspoken abolitionist, he condemned the Fugitive Slave Law, served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, championed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and refused to pay the poll tax in Massachusetts, partly on the ground that it sustained the institution of slavery. (One wonders how he would have learned about the law, the raid, or any of the rest without a newspaper, but never mind.) That institution was and remains the central moral and political crisis of American history, and much of Thoreau’s status stems from his absolute opposition to it.

But one may reach good ends by bad means, and Thoreau did. “Not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself,” Emerson wrote of Thoreau. He meant it as praise, but the trouble with that position—and the deepest of all the troubles disturbing the waters of “Walden”—is that it assumes that Thoreau had some better way of discerning the truth than other people did.

“If you tasted like umami, where would you be hiding?”

Thoreau, for one, did assume that. Like his fellow-transcendentalists, he was suspicious of tradition and institutions, and regarded personal intuition and direct revelation as superior foundations for both spiritual and secular beliefs. Unlike his fellow-transcendentalists, he also regarded his own particular intuitions and revelations as superior to those of other people. “Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,” he wrote in “Walden,” “it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.”

Claiming special guidance by the gods is the posture of the prophet: of one who believes himself in possession of revealed truth and therefore entitled—indeed, obliged—to enlighten others. Thoreau, comfortable with that posture, sneered at those who were not. (“They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families—damn them!”) But prophecy makes for poor political philosophy, for at least two reasons.

The first concerns the problem of fallibility. In “Resistance to Civil Government” (better known today as “Civil Disobedience”), Thoreau argued that his only political obligation was “to do at any time what I think right.” When constrained by its context, that line is compelling; it reads as a call to obey one’s conscience over and above unjust laws. But as a broader theory of governance, which it was, it is troubling. People routinely perpetrate wrongs out of obedience to their conscience, even in situations when the law mandates better behavior. (Consider the Kentucky county clerk currently refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.) Like public institutions, private moral compasses can err, and different ones frequently point in different directions. And, as the scholar Vincent Buranelli noted in a 1957 critique of Thoreau, “antagonism is never worse than when it involves two men each of whom is convinced that he speaks for goodness and rectitude.” It is the point of democracy to adjudicate among such conflicting claims through some means other than fiat or force, but Thoreau was not interested in that process.

Nor was he interested in subjecting his claims to logical scrutiny. And that is the second problem with basing one’s beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation: it justifies the substitution of anecdote and authority for evidence and reason. The result, in “Walden,” is an unnavigable thicket of contradiction and caprice. At one moment, Thoreau fulminates against the railroad, “that devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town”; in the next, he claims that he is “refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me.” At one moment, he argues that earlier civilizations are worthless; in the next, he combines a kids-today crankiness with nostalgia for the imagined superiority of the past. (“Husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us.”) On the subject of employment, “Walden” reads sometimes like “The 4-Hour Workweek” and sometimes like the collected sermons of John Calvin. Thoreau denigrates labor, praises leisure, and claims that he can earn his living for the month in a matter of days, only to turn around and write that “from exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.” So incoherent is his treatment of economics that E. B. White, otherwise a fan, wrote that Thoreau “rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions.” No one and nothing emerges unscathed, least of all the author.


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Emerson famously counselled against maintaining a foolish consistency, but Thoreau managed to get it wrong in both directions. His behavioral prescriptions are so foolishly inconsistent as to defy all attempts at reconciliation, while his moral sensibility is so foolishly consistent as to be naïve and cruel. (For one thing, Thoreau never understood that life itself is not consistent—that what worked for a well-off Harvard-educated man without dependents or obligations might not make an ideal universal code.) Those failings are ethical and intellectual, but they are also political. To reject all certainties but one’s own is the behavior of a zealot; to issue contradictory decrees based on private whim is that of a despot.


This is not the stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That government is best which governs not at all.”

Yet for a man who believed in governance solely by conscience, his own was frighteningly narrow. Thoreau had no understanding whatsoever of poverty and consistently romanticized it. (“Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.”) His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance. Indeed, when abolition was pitted against rugged individualism, the latter proved his higher priority. “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say,” he writes in “Walden,” “as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

A nation composed entirely of rugged individualists—so stinting that they had almost no needs, so solitary that those needs never conflicted with those of their compatriots—would not, it is true, need much governance. But such a nation has never existed, and even if nothing else militated against Thoreau’s political vision its impossibility alone would suffice. As the philosopher Avishai Margalit once put it (not apropos of Thoreau, though apropos of the similarly unachievable position of absolute stoicism), “I consider not being an option as being, in a way, enough of an argument.” So perhaps a sufficient argument against Thoreau is that, although he never admitted it, the life he prescribed was not an option even for him.

Only by elastic measures can “Walden” be regarded as nonfiction. Read charitably, it is a kind of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau. Read less charitably, it is akin to those recent best-selling memoirs whose authors turn out to have fabricated large portions of their stories. It is widely acknowledged that, to craft a tidier narrative, Thoreau condensed his twenty-six months at the cabin into a single calendar year. But that is the least of the liberties he takes with the facts, and the most forgivable of his manipulations of our experience as readers. The book is subtitled “Life in the Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude.

In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal. He made that walk several times a week, lured by his mother’s cookies or the chance to dine with friends. These facts he glosses over in “Walden,” despite detailing with otherwise skinflint precision his eating habits and expenditures. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother and sisters (who brought along more undocumented food) and downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time. This is the situation Thoreau summed up by saying, “For the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. . . . At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man.”

Does this disingenuousness matter? Countless Thoreau fans have argued that it does not, quoting by way of defense his own claim that “solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.” But, as the science writer David Quammen pointed out in a 1988 essay on Thoreau (before going on to pardon him), many kinds of solitude are measured in miles. Only someone who had never experienced true remoteness could mistake Walden for the wilderness or compare life on the bustling pond to that on the mid-nineteenth-century prairies. Indeed, an excellent corrective to “Walden” is the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who grew up on those prairies, and in a genuine little house in the big woods. Wilder lived what Thoreau merely played at, and her books are not only more joyful and interesting than “Walden” but also, when reread, a thousand times more harrowing. Real isolation presents real risks, both emotional and mortal, and, had Thoreau truly lived at a remove from other people, he might have valued them more. Instead, his case against community rested on an ersatz experience of doing without it.

Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions. Begin with falsified premises and you forfeit your authority. Apologists for Thoreau often claim that he merely distorted some trivial facts in the service of a deeper truth. But how deep can a truth be—indeed, how true can it be—if it is not built from facts? Thoreau contends that he went to Walden to construct a life on the basis of ethical and existential first principles, and that what he achieved as a result was simple and worth emulating. (His claim that he doesn’t want others to imitate him can’t be taken seriously. For one thing, “Walden” is a guide to doing just that, down to the number of chairs a man should own. For another, having dismissed all other life styles as morally and spiritually desperate, he doesn’t leave his readers much choice.)

But Thoreau did not live as he described, and no ethical principle is emptier than one that does not apply to its author. The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That’s just the gap between aspiration and execution, plus the variability in our needs and moods from one moment to the next—eminently human experiences, which, had Thoreau engaged with them, would have made for a far more interesting and useful book. The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities.

Why, given Thoreau’s hypocrisy, his sanctimony, his dour asceticism, and his scorn, do we continue to cherish “Walden”? One answer is that we read him early. “Walden” is a staple of the high-school curriculum, and you could scarcely write a book more appealing to teen-agers: Thoreau endorses rebellion against societal norms, champions idleness over work, and gives his readers permission to ignore their elders. (“Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures.”) “Walden” is also fundamentally adolescent in tone: Thoreau shares the conviction, far more developmentally appropriate and forgivable in teens, that everyone else’s certainties are wrong while one’s own are unassailable. Moreover, he presents adulthood not as it is but as kids wishfully imagine it: an idyll of autonomy, unfettered by any civic or familial responsibilities.

Another reason we cherish “Walden” is that we read it selectively. Although Thoreau is insufferable when fancying himself a seer, he is wonderful at actually seeing, and the passages he devotes to describing the natural world have an acuity and serenity that nothing else in the book approaches. It is a pleasure to read him on a battle between black and red ants; on the layers of ice that form as the pond freezes over in winter; on the breeze, birds, fish, waterbugs, and dust motes that differently disturb the surface of Walden. At one point, out in his boat, Thoreau paddles after a loon when it submerges, to try to be nearby when it resurfaces. “It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon,” he writes. “Suddenly your adversary’s checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again.” That is first-rate nature writing. Thoreau, too, emerges in a surprising place—in a game of checkers, where a lesser writer would have reached for hide-and-seek—and captures not only the behavior of the loon but a very human pleasure in being outdoors.


It is also in contemplating the land that Thoreau got the big picture right. “We can never have enough of nature,” he wrote. “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” However sham his own retreat was, however pinched and selfish his motives in undertaking it, he understood why the wilderness matters, and he was right that there is something salutary, liberating, and exhilarating about living in it with as little as necessary.

But any reading of Thoreau that casts him as a champion of nature is guilty of cherry-picking his most admirable work while turning a blind eye on all the rest. The other and more damning answer to the question of why we admire him is not that we read him incompletely and inaccurately but that we read him exactly right. Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.

Perhaps the strangest, saddest thing about “Walden” is that it is a book about how to live that says next to nothing about how to live with other people. Socrates, too, examined his life—in the middle of the agora. Montaigne obsessed over himself down to the corns on his toes, but he did so with camaraderie and mirth. Whitman, Thoreau’s contemporary and fellow-transcendentalist, joined him in singing a song of himself, striving to be untamed, encouraging us to resist much and obey little. But he was generous (“Give alms to everyone that asks”), empathetic (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and comfortable with multitudes, his and otherwise. He would have responded to a shipwreck as he did to the Civil War, tending the wounded and sitting with the grieving and the dying.

Poor Thoreau. He, too, was the victim of a kind of shipwreck—for reasons of his own psychology, a castaway from the rest of humanity. Ultimately, it is impossible not to feel sorry for the author of “Walden,” who dedicated himself to establishing the bare necessities of life without ever realizing that the necessary is a low, dull bar; whose account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one another; who lived alongside a pond, chronicled a trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and wrote about Cape Cod, all without recognizing that it is on watering holes and rivers and coastlines that human societies are built.

Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us. ♦


Published in the print edition of the October 19, 2015, issue, with the headline “Pond Scum.”


Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her latest book is “Lost & Found.”

Walden - Wikipedia

Walden - Wikipedia

Walden

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This article is about the book by Henry David Thoreau. For other uses, see Walden (disambiguation).

Walden

Original title page of Walden featuring a picture drawn by Thoreau's sister Sophia
Author	Henry David Thoreau
Original title	Walden; or, Life in the Woods
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Memoir
Published	August 9, 1854[1] (Ticknor and Fields: Boston)
Media type	Print
Text	Walden at Wikisource

Walden (/ˈwɔːldən/; first published in 1854 as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.^[2]

Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau makes precise scientific observations of nature as well as metaphorical and poetic uses of natural phenomena. He identifies many plants and animals by both their popular and scientific names, records in detail the color and clarity of different bodies of water, precisely dates and describes the freezing and thawing of the pond, and recounts his experiments to measure the depth and shape of the bottom of the supposedly "bottomless" Walden Pond.

Contents

• 1Background information
• 2Organization
• 3Themes
• 4Style and analysis
• 5Reception
• 6Adaptations
  • 6.1Video games
  • 6.2Digitization and scholarship efforts
  • 6.3Influence
• 7Notes
• 8External links

Background information[edit]

There has been much guessing as to why Thoreau went to the pond. E. B. White stated on this note, "Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight", while Leo Marx noted that Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond was an experiment based on his teacher Emerson's "method and of nature" and that it was a "report of an experiment in transcendental pastoralism".

Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intentions during his time at Walden Pond was "to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive, by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions?" He thought of it as an experiment in "home economics". Although Thoreau went to Walden to escape what he considered "over-civilization", and in search of the "raw" and "savage delight" of the wilderness, he also spent considerable amounts of his time reading and writing.^[3]

Thoreau used his time at Walden Pond (July 4, 1845 – September 6, 1847) to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.

By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period.

Organization[edit]

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 wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau^[4]

Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden opens with the announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple life without support of any kind. Readers are reminded that at the time of publication, Thoreau is back to living among the civilized again. The book is separated into specific chapters, each of which focuses on specific themes:

Economy: In this first and longest chapter, Thoreau outlines his project: a two-year, two-month, and two-day stay at a cozy, "tightly shingled and plastered", English-style 10' × 15' cottage in the woods near Walden Pond.^[5] He does this, he says, to illustrate the spiritual benefits of a simplified lifestyle. He easily supplies the four necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, and fuel) with the help of family and friends, particularly his mother, his best friend, and Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The latter provided Thoreau with a work exchange: he could build a small house and plant a garden if he cleared some land on the woodlot and did other chores while there.^[5] Thoreau meticulously records his expenditures and earnings, demonstrating his understanding of "economy", as he builds his house and buys and grows food.

Henry David Thoreau

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For: Thoreau recollects thoughts of places he stayed at before selecting Walden Pond, and quotes Roman philosopher Cato's advice "consider buying a farm very carefully before signing the papers".^[6] His possibilities included a nearby Hollowell farm (where the "wife" unexpectedly decided she wanted to keep the farm). Thoreau takes to the woods dreaming of an existence free of obligations and full of leisure. He announces that he resides far from social relationships that mail represents (post office) and the majority of the chapter focuses on his thoughts while constructing and living in his new home at Walden.^[5]

Reading: Thoreau discusses the benefits of classical literature, preferably in the original Greek or Latin, and bemoans the lack of sophistication in Concord evident in the popularity of unsophisticated literature. He also loved to read books by world travelers.^[7] He yearns for a time when each New England village supports "wise men" to educate and thereby ennoble the population.

Sounds: Thoreau encourages the reader to be "forever on the alert" and "looking always at what is to be seen".^[6] Although truth can be found in literature, it can equally be found in nature. In addition to self-development, developing one's perceptiveness can alleviate boredom. Rather than "look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre", Thoreau's own life, including supposedly dull pastimes like housework, becomes a source of amusement that "never ceases to be novel".^[6] Likewise, he obtains pleasure in the sounds that ring around his cabin: church bells ringing, carriages rattling and rumbling, cows lowing, whip-poor-wills singing, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and cockerels crowing. "All sound heard at the greatest possible distance," he contends "produces one and the same effect".^[6]

Solitude: Thoreau reflects on the feeling of solitude. He explains how loneliness can occur even amid companions if one's heart is not open to them. Thoreau meditates on the pleasures of escaping society and the petty things that society entails (gossip, fights, etc.). He also reflects on his new companion, an old settler who arrives nearby and an old woman with great memory ("memory runs back farther than mythology").^[8] Thoreau repeatedly reflects on the benefits of nature and of his deep communion with it and states that the only "medicine he needs is a draught of morning air".^[6]

Visitors: Thoreau talks about how he enjoys companionship (despite his love for solitude) and always leaves three chairs ready for visitors. The entire chapter focuses on the coming and going of visitors, and how he has more comers in Walden than he did in the city. He receives visits from those living or working nearby and gives special attention to a French Canadian born woodsman named Alec Thérien. Unlike Thoreau, Thérien cannot read or write and is described as leading an "animal life".^{[citation needed]} He compares Thérien to Walden Pond itself. Thoreau then reflects on the women and children who seem to enjoy the pond more than men, and how men are limited because their lives are taken up.

The Bean-Field: Reflection on Thoreau's planting and his enjoyment of this new job/hobby. He touches upon the joys of his environment, the sights and sounds of nature, but also on the military sounds nearby. The rest of the chapter focuses on his earnings and his cultivation of crops (including how he spends just under fifteen dollars on this).

The Village: The chapter focuses on Thoreau's reflections on the journeys he takes several times a week to Concord, where he gathers the latest gossip and meets with townsmen. On one of his journeys into Concord, Thoreau is detained and jailed for his refusal to pay a poll tax to the "state that buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house".^[9]

Walden Pond, discussed extensively in chapter The Ponds

The Ponds: In autumn, Thoreau discusses the countryside and writes down his observations about the geography of Walden Pond and its neighbors: Flint's Pond (or Sandy Pond), White Pond, and Goose Pond. Although Flint's is the largest, Thoreau's favorites are Walden and White ponds, which he describes as lovelier than diamonds.

Baker Farm: While on an afternoon ramble in the woods, Thoreau gets caught in a rainstorm and takes shelter in the dirty, dismal hut of John Field, a penniless but hard-working Irish farmhand, and his wife and children. Thoreau urges Field to live a simple but independent and fulfilling life in the woods, thereby freeing himself of employers and creditors. But the Irishman will not give up his aspirations of luxury and the quest for the American dream.

Higher Laws: Thoreau discusses whether hunting wild animals and eating meat is necessary. He concludes that the primitive, carnal sensuality of humans drives them to kill and eat animals, and that a person who transcends this propensity is superior to those who cannot. (Thoreau eats fish and occasionally salt pork and woodchuck.)^[5] In addition to vegetarianism, he lauds chastity, work, and teetotalism. He also recognizes that Native Americans need to hunt and kill moose for survival in "The Maine Woods", and eats moose on a trip to Maine while he was living at Walden.^[5] Here is a list of the laws that he mentions:

• One must love that of the wild just as much as one loves that of the good.
• What men already know instinctively is true humanity.
• The hunter is the greatest friend of the animal which is hunted.
• No human older than an adolescent would wantonly murder any creature which reveres its own life as much as the killer.
• If the day and the night make one joyful, one is successful.
• The highest form of self-restraint is when one can subsist not on other animals, but of plants and crops cultivated from the earth.

Brute Neighbors: This chapter is a simplified version of one of Thoreau's conversations with William Ellery Channing, who sometimes accompanied Thoreau on fishing trips when Channing had come up from Concord. The conversation is about a hermit (himself) and a poet (Channing) and how the poet is absorbed in the clouds while the hermit is occupied with the more practical task of getting fish for dinner and how in the end, the poet regrets his failure to catch fish. The chapter also mentions Thoreau's interaction with a mouse that he lives with, the scene in which an ant battles a smaller ant, and his frequent encounters with cats.

House-Warming: After picking November berries in the woods, Thoreau adds a chimney, and finally plasters the walls of his sturdy house to stave off the cold of the oncoming winter. He also lays in a good supply of firewood, and expresses affection for wood and fire.

Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors: Thoreau tells the stories of people who formerly lived in the vicinity of Walden Pond. Then, he talks about a few of the visitors he receives during the winter: a farmer, a woodchopper, and his best friend, the poet Ellery Channing.

Winter Animals: Thoreau amuses himself by watching wildlife during the winter. He relates his observations of owls, hares, red squirrels, mice, and various birds as they hunt, sing, and eat the scraps and corn he put out for them. He also describes a fox hunt that passes by.

The Pond in Winter: Thoreau describes Walden Pond as it appears during the winter. He says he has sounded its depths and located an underground outlet. Then, he recounts how 100 laborers came to cut great blocks of ice from the pond to be shipped to the Carolinas.

Spring: As spring arrives, Walden and the other ponds melt with powerful thundering and rumbling. Thoreau enjoys watching the thaw, and grows ecstatic as he witnesses the green rebirth of nature. He watches the geese winging their way north, and a hawk playing by itself in the sky. As nature is reborn, the narrator implies, so is he.

Conclusion: In the final chapter, Thoreau criticizes conformity: "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",^{[citation needed]} By doing so, men may find happiness and self-fulfillment.

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.^[10]

Themes[edit]

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Memorial with a replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden

The site of Thoreau's cabin marked by a cairn in 1908

Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons:

 First, it was written in an older prose, which uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence. 

Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, paradoxes, and double entendres. He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers. 

And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out to understand.

— Ken Kifer^[11]

Walden emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that, he argues, is the lot of most people. The book is not a traditional autobiography, but combines autobiography with a social critique of contemporary Western culture's consumerist and materialist attitudes and its distance from and destruction of nature.^[12] Thoreau's proximity to Concord society and his admiration for classical literature suggest that the book is not simply a criticism of society, but also an attempt to engage creatively with the better aspects of contemporary culture. There are signs of ambiguity, or an attempt to see an alternative side of something common. Some of the major themes that are present within the text are:

• Self-reliance: Thoreau constantly refuses to be in "need" of the companionship of others. Though he realizes its significance and importance, he thinks it unnecessary to always be in search for it. Self-reliance, to him, is economic and social and is a principle that in terms of financial and interpersonal relations is more valuable than anything. To Thoreau, self-reliance can be both spiritual as well as economic. Self-reliance was a key tenet of transcendentalism, famously expressed in Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance".
• Simplicity: Simplicity seems to be Thoreau's model for life. Throughout the book, Thoreau constantly seeks to simplify his lifestyle: he patches his clothes rather than buy new ones, he minimizes his consumer activity, and relies on leisure time and on himself for everything.
• Progress: In a world where everyone and everything is eager to advance in terms of progress, Thoreau finds it stubborn and skeptical to think that any outward improvement of life can bring inner peace and contentment.
• The need for spiritual awakening: Spiritual awakening is the way to find and realize the truths of life which are often buried under the mounds of daily affairs. Thoreau holds the spiritual awakening to be a quintessential component of life. It is the source from which all of the other themes flow.
• Man as part of nature
• Nature and its reflection of human emotions
• The state as unjust and corrupt
• Meditation: Thoreau was an avid meditator and often spoke about the benefits of meditating.
• Patience: Thoreau realizes that the methods he tries to employ at Walden Pond will not be instituted in the near future.^[13] He does not like compromise, so he must wait for change to occur.^[13] He does not go into isolation in the woods of Massachusetts for over two years for his own benefit.^[13] Thoreau wants to transform the world around him, but understands that it will take time.^[13]

Style and analysis[edit]

Walden has been the subject of many scholarly articles. Book reviewers, critics, scholars, and many more have published literature on Thoreau's Walden.

Thoreau carefully recounts his time in the woods through his writing in Walden. Critics have thoroughly analyzed the different writing styles that Thoreau uses. Critic Nicholas Bagnall writes that Thoreau's observations of nature are "lyrical" and "exact".^[14] Another critic, Henry Golemba, asserts that the writing style of Walden is very natural.^[15] Thoreau employs many styles of writing where his words are both intricate and simple at the same time.^[15] His word choice conveys a certain mood.^[15] For instance, when Thoreau describes the silence of nature, the reader may feel that serene moment as well.^[15] Thoreau continues to connect back to nature throughout the book because he wants to depict what he experienced and what he saw.^[15]

Many scholars have compared Thoreau to fellow transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Thoreau was 14 years younger than Emerson, lots of his writing was influenced by him.^[16] Critic John Brooks Moore examined the relationship between Thoreau and Emerson and the effects it had on their respective works.^[16] Moore claims that Thoreau did not simply mimic Emerson's work, but he was actually the more dominant one in the relationship.^[16] Thoreau has learned from Emerson and some "Emersonism" can be found in his works, but Thoreau's work is distinct from Emerson's.^[16]

Scholars have recognized Walden's use of biblical allusions.^[17] Such allusions are useful tools to convince readers because the Bible is seen as a principal book of truth.^{[17][dubious – discuss]} According to scholar Judith Saunders, the signature biblical allusion identified in the book is, "Walden was dead and is alive again."^[17] This is almost verbatim from Luke 15.11-32.^[17] Thoreau is personifying Walden Pond to further the story relevant to the Bible.^[17] He compares the process of death and rebirth of the pond to self-transformation in humans.^[17]

Reception[edit]

Site of Thoreau's cabin, 2010

Street names in Concord, Massachusetts named after Thoreau

Walden enjoyed some success upon its release, but still took five years to sell 2,000 copies,^[18] and then went out of print until Thoreau's death in 1862.^[19] Despite its slow beginnings, later critics have praised it as an American classic that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America".^[20]

It is often assumed that critics initially ignored Walden, and that those who reviewed the book were evenly split or slightly more negative than positive in their assessment of it. But, researchers have shown that Walden actually was "more favorably and widely received by Thoreau's contemporaries than hitherto suspected".^[21] Of the 66 initial reviews that have been found so far, 46 "were strongly favorable".^[21] Some reviews were rather superficial, merely recommending the book or predicting its success with the public; others were more lengthy, detailed, and nuanced with both positive and negative comments. Positive comments included praise for Thoreau's independence, practicality, wisdom, "manly simplicity",^[22] and fearlessness. Less than three weeks after the book's publication, Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed, "All American kind are delighted with Walden as far as they have dared to say."^[23]

On the other hand, the terms "quaint" or "eccentric" appeared in over half of the book's initial reviews.^[21] Other terms critical of Thoreau included selfish, strange, impractical, privileged (or "manor born"^[24]), and misanthropic.^[25] One review compared and contrasted Thoreau's form of living to communism, probably not in the sense of Marxism, but instead of communal living or religious communism. While valuing freedom from possessions, Thoreau was not communal in the sense of practicing sharing or of embracing community. So, communism "is better than our hermit's method of getting rid of encumbrance".^[26]

In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it "womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly" about the lifestyle.^[27] Poet John Greenleaf Whittier criticized what he perceived as the message in Walden that man should lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs. He said: "Thoreau's Walden is a capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish ... After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs".^[28] Author Edward Abbey criticized Thoreau's ideas and experiences at Walden in detail throughout his response to Walden called "Down the River with Thoreau", written in 1980.^[29]

Today, despite these criticisms, Walden stands as one of America's most celebrated works of literature. John Updike wrote of Walden, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."^[30] The American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Walden with him in his youth,^[31] and eventually wrote Walden Two in 1945, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members who live together in a Thoreau-inspired community.^[32]

Kathryn Schulz has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious based on his writings in Walden,^[33] although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.^[34][35]

Adaptations[edit]

Video games[edit]

The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 bestowed Tracy Fullerton, game designer and professor at the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab with a $40,000 grant to create, based on the book, a first person, open world video game called Walden, a game,^[36] in which players "inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods".^[37] The game production was also supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was part of the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab in 2014. The game was released to critical acclaim on July 4, 2017, celebrating both the day that Thoreau went down to the pond to begin his experiment and the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. It was nominated for the Off-Broadway Award for Best Indie Game at the New York Game Awards 2018.^[38]

Digitization and scholarship efforts[edit]

Digital Thoreau,^[39] a collaboration among the State University of New York at Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project, has developed a fluid text edition of Walden^[40] across the different versions of the work to help readers trace the evolution of Thoreau's classic work across seven stages of revision from 1846 to 1854. Within any chapter of Walden, readers can compare up to seven manuscript versions with each other, with the Princeton University Press edition,^[41] and consult critical notes drawn from Thoreau scholars, including Ronald Clapper's dissertation The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text^[42] (1967) and Walter Harding's Walden: An Annotated Edition^[43] (1995). Ultimately, the project will provide a space for readers to discuss Thoreau in the margins of his texts.

Influence[edit]

• Jonas Mekas' 1968 film Walden is loosely inspired by the book.
• Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain trilogy (1959) draws heavily from themes expressed in Walden. Protagonist Sam Gribley is nicknamed "Thoreau" by an English teacher he befriends.
• Shane Carruth's second film Upstream Color (2013) features Walden as a central item of its story, and draws heavily on the themes expressed by Thoreau.
• In 1962, William Melvin Kelley titled his first novel, A Different Drummer, after a famous quote from Walden: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer." The quote, as well as another stanza from the book, appears as an epigraph in Kelley's novel, which echoes Thoreau's theme of individualism.
• The name of the gay men's culture and news magazine Drum, which began publication in 1964, was inspired by the same quote, which appeared in every edition^[44]
• The 1989 film Dead Poets Society heavily features an excerpt from Walden as a motif in the plot.
• The Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish praphrased the quote "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" on their 2011 song "The Crow, The Owl And The Dove". The also makes several references to Walden on their eighth studio album Endless Forms Most Beautiful of 2015, including in the song titled "My Walden".
• The investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. was named for the last sentence in Walden by founder and CEO Joe Mansueto, and the "O" in the company's logo is shaped like a rising sun.
• In the 2015 video game Fallout 4, which takes place in Massachusetts, there exists a location called Walden Pond, where the player can listen to an automated tourist guide detail Thoreau's experience living in the wilderness. At the location there stands a small house which is said to be the same house Thoreau built and stayed in.
• Phoebe Bridgers references the book in her song "Smoke Signals".
• In 2018, MC Lars and Mega Ran released a song called "Walden" where they discuss the book and its influence.
• In the 1997 episode "Weight Gain 4000" of South Park, Eric Cartman "writes" a prize-winning essay copied from Walden, replacing Thoreau's name with his own.
• Professor Richard Primack from Boston University utilizes information from Thoreau's Walden in climate change research.^[45]
• It is suggested that the genre of nature writing in American literature is derived from Thoreau's Walden.^[46]
• In 2021, episode two of the popular K-drama Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, which tells the story of a big city dentist moving to a lesser known country town to start a clinic, references the following passage from Thoreau's Walden, "What I desire are the flowers and fruit of people", to emphasis the male protagonist's (the town's chiefs) outlook on life.

Notes[edit]

1. ^ Alfred, Randy (August 9, 2010). "Aug. 9, 1854: Thoreau Warns, 'The Railroad Rides on Us'". Wired News. Retrieved August 8, 2011.
2. ^ transcendentalism and social reform by Philip F. Gura, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
3. ^ Jonathan, Levin. "Introduction to Walden and Civil Disobedience". Library of Congress. Retrieved March 29, 2021.
4. ^ Grammardog Guide to Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, Grammardog LLC, ISBN 1-60857-084-3, p. 25
5. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Smith, Delivered at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, on July 14, 2007, Richard. "Thoreau's First Year at Walden in Fact & Fiction". Retrieved May 3, 2014.
6. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Thoreau, Henry David. Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, p. 61.
7. ^ "The Maine Woods Henry David Thoreau Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer With a new introduction by Paul Theroux" (Press release). Princeton University. January 2004. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
8. ^ Thoreau, Henry David. "Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008, p. 96.
9. ^ "Walden Study Guide : Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1–3". GradeSaver. September 30, 2000. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
10. ^ "Walden, and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau". Gutenberg.org. January 26, 2013. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
11. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on March 18, 2006. Retrieved December 28, 2010.
12. ^ Johnson, Peter Anto (April 2018). "Perspectives of Civilization: New Beginnings After the End". Digital Literature Review. 5: 17–23. doi:10.33043/DLR.5.0.17-23.
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Wood, Peter W. "Thoreau on ice." Claremont Review of Books, vol. 14, no. 4, Fall 2014, p. 90+. Gale Literature Resource Center
14. ^ Bagnall, Nicholas. "Walden." New Statesman, vol. 126, no. 4363, 5 Dec. 1997, p. 57. Gale Literature Resource Center
15. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Golemba, Henry. "Unreading Thoreau." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Kathy D. Darrow, vol. 207, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, Originally published in American Literature, vol. 60, no. 3, Oct. 1988, pp. 385-401.
16. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Moore, John Brooks. "Thoreau Rejects Emerson." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Kathy D. Darrow, vol. 207, Gale, 2009. Gale Literature Resource Center, Originally published in American Literature, vol. 4, no. 3, Nov. 1932, pp. 241-256.
17. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Saunders, Judith P. "Thoreau's Walden." The Explicator 58.3 (2000): 138-40. ProQuest.
18. ^ "Henry David Thoreau (American writer): Works". Britannica.com. April 18, 2013. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
19. ^ Dean, Bradley P.; Scharnhorst, Gary (1990). "The Contemporary Reception of Walden". Studies in the American Renaissance: 293–328.
20. ^ Frost, Robert. "Letter to Wade Van Dore", (June 24, 1922), in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden, ed. Richard Ruland. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. (1968), 8. LCCN 68-14480.
21. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Dean and Scharnhorst 293.
22. ^ Dean and Scharnhorst 302.
23. ^ Quoted in Dean and Scharnhorst 293, from Ralph L. Rusk (ed.), The Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson (vol. 4), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) pp. 459–60.
24. ^ Dean and Scharnhorst 300.
25. ^ Dean and Scharnhorst 293–328.
26. ^ Dean and Scharnhorst 298.
27. ^ "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions". Cornhill Magazine. June 1880.
28. ^ Wagenknecht, Edward. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Portrait in Paradox. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967: 112.
29. ^ Abbey, Edward (1980). "Down the River with Thoreau".
30. ^ John Updike, "A Sage for all seasons", The Guardian, June 25, 2004
31. ^ Skinner, B. F. A Matter of Consequences. 1938
32. ^ Skinner, B. F. Walden 2. 1942
33. ^ Schulz, Kathryn (October 19, 2015). "Henry David Thoreau, Hypocrite". The New Yorker. Retrieved October 19, 2015.
34. ^ Malesic, Jonathan (October 19, 2015). "Henry David Thoreau's Radical Optimism". New Republic. Archived from the original on October 19, 2015. Retrieved October 19, 2015.
35. ^ Hohn, Donovan (October 21, 2015). "Everybody Hates Henry". New Republic. Archived from the original on October 26, 2015. Retrieved October 21, 2015.
36. ^ http://www.waldengame.com
37. ^ Flood, Alison (April 26, 2012). "Walden Woods video game will recreate the world of Thoreau". The Guardian. Retrieved April 26, 2012.
38. ^ Whitney, Kayla (January 25, 2018). "Complete list of winners of the New York Game Awards 2018". AXS. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
39. ^ "digitalthoreau.org". digitalthoreau.org. July 18, 2013. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
40. ^ "Walden: a Fluid Text Edition". April 4, 2016.
41. ^ Thoreau, H.D.; Shanley, J.L., ed.: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden. (Hardcover). Press.princeton.edu. April 17, 2014. ISBN 9780691061948. Retrieved May 3, 2014.
42. ^ The development of Walden: a genetic text. (Book, 1968). [WorldCat.org]. February 22, 1999. OCLC 1166552.
43. ^ Walden : an annotated edition (Book, 1995). [WorldCat.org]. May 8, 2012. OCLC 31709850.
44. ^ Streitmatter, Rodger (1995). Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. Boston, Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-19873-2, p. 60
45. ^ Wulf, Andrea. "A Man for All Seasons." The New York Times Book Review, 21 Apr. 2013, p. 30(L). Gale Literature Resource Center
46. ^ "Ecocriticism and Nineteenth-Century Literature." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, edited by Russel Whitaker, vol. 140, Gale, 2004. Gale Literature Resource Center

External links[edit]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Walden, or, Life in the Woods

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Walden.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Walden

• Walden at Project Gutenberg
• Walden – Digitized copy of the first edition from the Internet Archive.
• Walden at Standard Ebooks
• "Walden (book)" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.
•  Walden public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Walden: An Annotated Edition (hyperlinked TOC, footnotes and scholarly commentary). R. Lenat (ed.). Thoreau Society and Iowa State University project.
• Walden, a purple wallaby like creature in the kid's cartoon Wow Wow Wubbzy!.