Transcending Above it All

As in all relationships, there are reasons for staying and for leaving. In Thoreau's case, he has a lot of flaws, and his critics have had about 173 years to notice them. For one thing, Thoreau held the majority of people in contempt. Critic Ira Booker points out that the poet-naturalist had a distaste for "the 'low' pursuits of his countrymen . . . [which] sometimes sound like an effort to prove that, while he may not have been able to live up to Nature's standards, he has achieved what he believes to be some of the highest callings of mere humans: he is well-read, capable of appreciating Nature, and resourceful enough to establish his own dwelling in the woods." I should add here that he was resourceful enough to establish his own one-room shack in woods borrowed from his one-time friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau didn't get along with many people, so one suspects his two years in the woods may have been a relief to some of his neighbors who remained in town. He was almost constantly patronizing in his attitudes toward most living people; he loathed the Irish immigrants doing the grunt work in his community, but he revered the people who had lived on Walden Pond a generation or more earlier. He respected the local Native Americans, but only because he didn't know any personally. For some reason, these qualities remind me of a lot of some of our contemporary eco-warriors, who embrace Thoreau's idea that Nature with a capital N is only deserved by those who are educated enough to appreciate it.

And researchers say Thoreau expressed admiration for only one woman in his life, a young Irish servant who read On Walden Pond and wanted to live the same way, on her own property. Typically, he wrote a lovely tribute to her in his journal, but left her name out of the entry.

Booker calls Thoreau "stiff-necked," and after some weeks in his company, I have to agree. Still, I feel sorry for him in one respect: he was a loner who didn't know how to be anything else:
"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."

Elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau indicates he restricted his diet severely, living mostly on corn meal, molasses, and a few berries. He boasted about how clean his diet was, and derided others for indulging in milk, butter, coffee, and tea. Toward the end of the book, he talks about his virtuous joy in becoming light-headed from hunger. He sounds remarkably like an anorexic -- he certainly ate like one.

In more than one way, Thoreau was lost in the woods, a forest of his own making.

And that's what I love about college: I would never have come to know Thoreau in this way. Otherwise, I would have thought he was the idol of the environmentalists and the political independents. He may well be, but poor, friendless Thoreau was a great deal more.