Walden — Henry David Thoreau on Home-Cosmography

Walden — Henry David Thoreau on Simplicity and Home-Cosmography

Hypocrisy at Walden Pond

Many great thinkers, from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr, were influenced by the nineteenth century philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau. His penetrating insights, experts say, have “rippled into time.” Today, as a “cornerstone” of American nonfiction, millions of students learn about his ruminations on civil disobedience and the solitary life.

Yet his writings are often bathed in hypocrisy. “Thoreau did not live as he described” in his classic book Walden, writes Kathryn Schulz in her essay for The New Yorker. Thoreau tells us, for one, that he sought solitude and simplicity in the woods because he wanted to “suck out all the marrow of life.” But Walden Pond, where he resided in seclusion for just over two years, was not nearly as remote as he made it seem. As Schulz points out, “Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes.” In fact, “he made that walk several times a week, lured by his mother’s cookies or the chance to dine with friends.”

I’d argue, however, that Thoreau’s hypocrisy is not only humorous in hindsight, it is emblematic of modern life and the social condition. Thoreau even says it himself. All of us “exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us.” Indeed, we read, celebrate and idolize his musings, but return the next day to our desks and offices to perpetuate the same asinities that he wrote against. A reading of Walden in the twenty-first century reveals to us that very little about the human impulse has changed.

Garment after garment

This much is true. Many of us, Thoreau notes, remain “occupied with the factitious cares [of life].” We forget that “superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.” Most symbolic of this, perhaps, is in our clothing. “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new”, he writes. Here, our choices are driven not only by utility or warmth, but by the eyes and judgments of others. So “we don garment after garment”—amassing cloth and garb to no good end.

Thoreau wonders if we could tell who was deserving of rank and respect if we were stripped of all embellishment and adornment. Opulence and luxury, he suspects, are “hindrances to the elevation” of humankind. He points to the philosophers of ancient Greece and early India who lived “a more simple and meager life.” For their wealth rests not in their pockets or homes but in the interiors of the mind.

“Only they who go to soirées and legislative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them… I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes… A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do.”
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Luxurious boxes and papers

Indeed, “while civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the [people] who are to inhabit them”, writes Thoreau. Many are “needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have one as their neighbors have.” People build miniature castles on the greenest pastures with “empty guest chambers for empty guests”, contracting themselves unwittingly to a lifetime of servitude to their banks.

“Even the poor student… is taught only political economy, while [the] economy of living… is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is that while he is reading Adam Smith, [David] Ricardo, and [Jean-Baptiste] Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably… As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements:’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.”
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Thoreau reminds us that “it is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow.” Today, it is a frenzy of haste and waste. Workers, corporations, and nations everywhere find themselves locked in an irresistible, inescapable dilemma to earn, accumulate, and succeed over the rest. “We live meanly, like ants”, Thoreau writes—“error upon error… clout upon clout… our life is frittered away by detail.”

“The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world—how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Simplify, simplify

Fortunately, we do not have to follow the masses and their mirages to the ends of the Earth. Fulfilment may lay elsewhere. And while he did not live exactly to his own lofty ideals, Thoreau proffers a cure for the ills of self and society. The first is to simplify our lives. That is to find more with less, and to undertake the “experiment of living” with less material desire. Such a rule, he assures, will make our daily complications less complicated. It will allow us to see further and deeper.

Of each of us, Thoreau only asks that we be “careful to find out and pursue [our] own way.” That we choose our paths because it is ours, and not simply one that is amenable to the whims and fancies of our families, neighbors, corporations, and society. Such a life, of course, requires some daring and opportunity. A willingness to stray from the beaten track. For those of us who are lucky enough to have the choice, we would do well not to squander it.

“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. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak.”
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Home-cosmography

I have, however, interpreted Thoreau rather selectively to highlight the excesses of society that persist to this day. This despite the manifold advances we have claimed to have made over the last two centuries. I wish only that we might stumble less mindlessly into our daily struggles, and that we use our time more wisely. “It is true”, Thoreau writes, “we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harbourless coast”, constricted by the “narrowness of [our] experience.”

Still, he encourages us to:

“Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of [our] own streams and oceans; explore [our] own higher latitudes… Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within [us], opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Say what you will about the man, but surely you must agree that some amount of quiet introspection is necessary to the furthering of oneself and society. Perhaps that is why the memory of Thoreau survives to this day, as egotistical or elitist or hypocritical as he may seem. Much of what he professes appears to ring true.

So let us end then with this poem and prescription from Thoreau himself:

‘Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography.’
Henry David Thoreau. (1854). Walden.

Sources and further reading

Thoreau, Henry David. (1854). Walden; or Life in the Woods.
Schulz, Kathryn. (2015). The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau.
Johnson, Fenton. (2020). At the Center of All Beauty.
De Botton, Alain. (2004). Status Anxiety.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. (1983). The Anatomy of Power.
Thomas, Lewis. (1974). The Lives of a Cell.
Dyson, Freeman. (1988). Infinite in All Directions.