알라딘: 아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경

알라딘: 아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경

아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경
김재형,고석수,천바이비 (지은이)모시는사람들2021-12-10





























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책소개
가장 오래된 수양서의 하나인 『도덕경』을 쉬운 번역, 현대의 가치관과 언어의 독창적 해설로 풀어냈다. 『도덕경』이 한중일 삼국에서 공통된 가치를 줄 수 있다는 생각으로부터 출발, 하나의 책에 한국어, 중국어, 일본어를 함께 수록하는 이 기획을 완성했고, 시대와 지역의 한계를 넘은 새로운 가치를 부여했다.


목차


I 有無相生(유무상생)
II 上善若水(상선약수)
III 微妙玄通(미묘현통)
IV 愚人之心(우인지심)
V 恍兮惚兮(황혜홀혜)
VI 道法自然(도법자연)
VII 道常, 無爲而無不爲(도상, 무위이무불위)
VIII 道生一, 一生二, 二生三, 三生萬物(도생일, 일생이, 이생삼, 삼생만물)
IX 知止(지지)
X 聖人無常心(성인무상심)
XI 含德之厚(함덕지후)
XII 玄同, 和光同塵(현동, 화광동진)
XIII 治人事天莫若嗇(치인사천막약색)
XIV 天下難事, 必作於易(천하난사, 필작어역)
XV 不敢爲天下先(불감위천하선)
XVI 不爭之德(부쟁지덕)
XVII 易知易行(역지역항)
XVIII 天之道損有餘而補不足(천지도손유여이보부족)
XIX 小國寡民(소국과민)

에필로그: 표지 그림 ‘현빈의 문[玄牝之门]’ 작가노트
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책속에서



P. 14~15‘무無’에서 하늘과 땅이 시작됩니다. ‘유有’는 어머니처럼 세상 만물을 낳습니다. ‘무無’를 자세히 보면 드러나지 않은 미세한 기운이 보입니다. ‘유有’를 자세히 보면 ‘무無’와 만물이 어떻게 이어져 있는지 보입니다. 세상이 시작된 첫 마음(無, 天地之始)과 세상 만물(有, 萬物之母)은 다른 것이 아니라, 양자 얽힘(quantum emtanglement)으로 이어진 하나입니다. 접기
P. 26하늘과 땅 사이는 풀무처럼 텅 비어 있어 써도 써도 끝이 없는 것처럼, 성인은 무슨 일이 일어나든 다 받아들입니다. 지나치게 많이 말하면 궁지에 몰립니다. 무슨 일이 일어나든 텅 빈 중심을 지킵시다(守中).
P. 48~49오래된 것을 이해하면서 현실에 맞게 사용하는 사람은 삶의 양면성을 꿰뚫어보는 미묘현통微妙玄通한 힘이 있어서 그 깊이를 알 수 없습니다. 굳이 그 모습을 설명하라고 하면, 겨울 언 강을 건너듯 주춤거리고, 사방에 어려운 이웃이 있는 것처럼 멈칫멈칫하고, 손님처럼 어려워하고, 녹는 얼음처럼 맺힘이 없고, 다듬지 않은 통나무처럼 소박하고, 계곡처럼 트이고, 계곡을 흐르는 흙탕물 같습니다. 접기
P. 100남을 아는 것은 지혜이지만, 나 자신을 아는 것은 지혜를 넘어선 밝음입니다. 다른 사람을 이기는 데는 힘이 필요하지만, 자기를 이기려면 힘을 넘어선 강함이 있어야 합니다. 만족할 줄 알면 풍요로워지고, 힘써 실천하면 뜻을 이루게 됩니다.
P. 138문밖을 나가지 않아도 내 삶을 보면 세상을 알 수 있습니다. 창문으로 하늘을 보지 않아도 우주의 질서를 알 수 있습니다. 멀리 돌아다닌다고 더 많이 아는 게 아닙니다. 자기 스스로를 성찰하는 성인은 멀리 다니지 않아도 알고, 보지 않아도 본 것처럼 밝게 구분하고, 애쓰지 않고도 이룰 수 있습니다.
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저자 및 역자소개
김재형 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

해월 최시형 선생님의 마음을 가르치기 위해 보따리 학교(cafe.naver.com/pottari)를 만들어 선생님의 말씀을 아이들에게 읽어 줬다. 청소년들이 읽어도 이해할 수 있는 책을 쓰고 싶어졌다.
1996년 농촌으로 귀농해서 좋은 농민이 되기 위해 노력했지만 쉽지 않았다. 대신 몸과 마음에 농민의 정서를 담을 수 있었다. 2002년 우리쌀 지키기 100인 100일 걷기 운동을 기획해서 실행했다. 곡성에서 죽곡농민열린도서관을 만들어 오랫동안 책임을 맡았다. 두 권의 마을 시집을 편집했고 ‘농민 인문학’이라는 이름으로 수많은 강의와 행사를 기획한 공부 운동을 일으켰다. 마을 연구자 정기석은 ‘24인의 마을주의자’라는 책에서 이 과정을 소개하며 ‘마을 선비’라고 불렀다. 선애마을 공동체의 마을 학교인 선애학교의 교장을 맡았다.
50살이 되던 해 이후 삶의 역할을 ‘동아시아 인문운동가’로 정한 뒤 일년에 3~4개월을 중국에 머물며 중국의 여러 생태 운동가들과 만나고 공부한다. 항조우(杭州)에 있는 삼생곡(三生谷) 공동체의 개방 대학인 삼생곡서원(三生谷?院)의 동아시아 사상 객원 교수이다. 매년 동아시아 시민들의 자율 축제인 동아시아지구시민촌에 참여한다. 『시로 읽는 주역』(내일을 여는 책, 2016)을 쓴 이후 전국 여러 도시에서 주역 강의를 열고 있다. 동아시아 우주관인 음양오행 세계관에 기반을 둔 ‘음양오행 민주주의’ 모델을 만들어 동아시아인들이 공유하게 하는 것이 남은 생의 꿈이다. 동학 공부는 동아시아 민주주의 이해를 위한 기반 중 하나였다. 접기


최근작 : <아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경>,<지구별 생태사상가>,<시로 읽는 주역> … 총 4종 (모두보기)

고석수 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

한중일 세 언어를 동아시아 산 속에서 배우며 살고 있다. 돈이 아니라 언어에 기대며 서로를 살리는 창발적 문화를 만들고 싶다. 대만의 사이좋은 스튜디오友善南庄工作室, 일본의 표주박 시장ひょうたん市場을 함께 만들고 있다. 코로나 이후, 제주 강정에서 친구들과 범선으로 동아시아 바다를 다시 잇는 공평해公平海 프로젝트를 준비하고 있다.


최근작 : <아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경>

천바이비 (지은이)
저자파일
신간알리미 신청

시인. 여성 농민. 중국의 전통 문화 예술을 현대적 안목으로 읽는 ‘재조고향再造故鄕’ 운동을 했다. 그 결과를 모아 ‘열 세가지 아름다움十三 味’을 윈난민족출판사에서 냈다. 깊은 산속 항조우杭州 삼생곡 공동체 마을에서 고전을 읽고 시를 쓰고 농사짓는다. 주역의 상징을 시로 다시 읽으며 중국어판 ‘시로 읽는 주역’을 기획하고 있다.


최근작 : <아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경>


출판사 제공 책소개

춘추전국시대는 전쟁이 국가의 중요한 국정과제이던 시대였습니다. 부국강병의 열망이 중국 전역을 휘감았습니다. 전쟁이 일상이 된 시대 지식인의 자기 과제는 전쟁을 끝낼 수 있는 현실적 전략과 미래 비젼을 세우고 평화를 이루는 일입니다. 고통이 큰 만큼 지식인들의 대응도 깊고 넓었습니다. 노자는 이 시대를 깊고 넓은 눈과 마음으로 바라본 대표적 지식인 중의 한 사람입니다.
춘추전국시대 정도 지식인의 열망이 타오른 시기 중 하나가 1, 2차 세계대전 이후의 유럽입니다. 서구의 수많은 지성들이 전쟁 없는 세상에 대한 열망을 다양한 철학적 사유와 실천을 통해 정리해 나갔고, 그 결실 중 하나가 유럽연합입니다. 유럽은 최소한 유럽연합 내에서 전쟁이 없는 상태 정도에는 이르렀습니다.
북미의 미합중국, 유럽의 유럽연합 다음에 이루어질 국가, 지역을 넘어서는 연방이나 연합을 이룰 수 있는 잠재력을 가진 지역은 동아시아입니다. 유럽의 평화 경험에서 보이지 않는 정신적 동질성은 성경과 그리스 로마 신화입니다. 오래된 경전과 신화의 재해석은 국가와 민족의 틀을 넘어서는데 유용한 전략입니다.
저자인 김재형, 고석수, 천바이비를 비롯한 여러 동아시아의 형제들은 동아시아의 평화라는 꿈을 공유하며 오랫동안 만나왔습니다. 그 만남에서 서로의 차이를 극복하는 데 동아시아 고전을 적절하게 이용하는 것이 의미있는 전략이라는 것을 알게 되었습니다. 그들은 만나면 먼저 동아시아 경전을 읽고 토론하는 것에서부터 시작했습니다. 표면적인 차이가 있더라도 한문에 기반을 둔 텍스트를 같이 읽는 순간부터 깊은 마음의 세계, 도(道)와 덕(德), 중용(中庸), 인(仁)과 의(義) 라는 깊은 심층 의식 속에서는 깊은 형제 의식을 느낄 수 있었습니다. 그들은 한중일 세 언어로 쓰여지는 동아시아 경전 시리즈에 대한 꿈을 꾸기 시작했고, 동아시아 도덕경은 그 꿈의 첫 결실입니다.
도덕경은 두 권의 책이 있습니다. 한 권은 노자께서 쓰신 우리가 눈으로 읽을 수 있는 도덕경입니다. 또 한 권은 읽을 수 없는 도덕경입니다. 어쩌면 도덕경은 읽을 수 없는 도덕경을 읽기 위한 마중물 같은 책인지도 모릅니다. 도덕경은 이런 논리를 ‘유(有)와 무(無)’ 라는 개념으로 설명합니다. 글자로 쓰여 지지 않은 도덕경은 도덕경을 함께 읽는 사람들 안에 있습니다.
이 책 『아름다운 세 언어, 동아시아 도덕경』은 한국, 중국, 일본, 대만, 북조선의 형제들이 한자리에 모이는 자리에서 읽혀질 책이 되길 바라는 기원을 담고 있습니다. 이런 개념을 출판에 적용해서 현실적인 책으로 편집하는 일은 쉬운 일은 아닙니다. 다양한 방식으로 언어를 재구성하고 다른 언어 사용자들이 받아들일 수 있는 아름다운 언어와 적절한 이해 지점을 찾기 위해 노력했습니다.
이 책은 동아시아인들이 평화로운 삶에 대한 상상을 할 때 공유 지점을 찾을 수 있는 의미 있는 도구 중 하나가 될 수 있습니다. 접기



매일 아침, 도덕경 한장을 또박또박 읽는다.
한자로도 읽고 일본어로도 읽어본다.
재형선생님이 풀어주신 해설은 사랑, 평화 그 자체.
아름다운 언어에 출렁이는 마음을 느끼며 한 장을 아껴가며 읽고, 다시 반복해서 읽으며 마음에 담는다.
호야호야 2021-11-30 공감 (2) 댓글 (1)
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공감



동아시아 도덕경.
경전을 동아시아인들이 각자의 언어로 읽는 일은 동아시아 평화 운동의 의미있는 과제입니다.
botarinim 2021-12-02 공감 (2) 댓글 (0)
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공감



김재형선생님의 동아시아 도덕경은 다정한 어른이 머리를 쓰다듬어주며 조곤조곤 들려주는 옛이야기처럼 조용히 스며든다. 세나라 언어가 마치 음표처럼 적혀있어 신기하다. 세나라 사람들이 한곳에 모여 동시에 같은책을 읽고 토론하는 모습을 상상하게 되는것 만으로 신선한 발상의 책이다.

하늘을 그리는 사람들 퇴계ㆍ다산ㆍ동학의 하늘철학, 조성환 저

하늘을 그리는 사람들 - YES24






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

첫번째 구매리뷰를 남겨주세요. | 판매지수 60 판매지수란? 베스트 한국철학 15위

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출간일 2022년 01월 25일
카테고리 분류
국내도서 > 인문 > 한국철학 > 한국철학의 이해/한국철학사

카드뉴스로 보는 책


1/4다음 이미지 배너

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
접어보기

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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A Father and Daughter Experience the Magic of Memory


“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.”