literature review

At Walden, Thoreau Wasn’t Really Alone With Nature Kaag, John; Clancy, Martin . New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Jul 10,

2017.

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ABSTRACT (ENGLISH) The philosopher’s profound experience had as much to do with the human landscape as it did with the natural one. FULL TEXT Correction Appended

He lived on an acre just above Walden Pond. He had a small garden, survived off the land, and enjoyed the wild

apples that still grew around Concord, Mass., in the 19th century. He stayed near Walden because it was here that

he could be most free.

His name was not Henry David Thoreau.

Brister Freeman was a black man, one of the original inhabitants of Walden Woods. As Laura Walls tells us in her

new biography of Thoreau , Freeman fought in the Revolution, and afterward “declared his independence through

his surname,” but “unable to prove his freedom outside of Concord, he bought an acre on the hill north of Walden

Pond, Brister’s Hill.” Today, Walden is preserved as a state park, and is a Registered National Historic Landmark,

and so long as visitors can find parking, they come and go as they please —as did Thoreau —but many of his

neighbors couldn’t.

On Thoreau’s 200th birthday this July he might want us to remember the men and women, largely unacknowledged

by history, who were confined to this paradisiacal corner of the earth. It was, indeed, a sanctuary, but for many of

Thoreau’s companions freedom was narrowly circumscribed. Their world was, according to the historian Elise

Lemire, the “Black Walden ,” a place of not-so-quiet desperation.

For consumers of conventional history, it is easy enough to fall into the impression that Thoreau was the only

person at Walden, that the pond was a pristine tract of wilderness. It wasn’t. Walden was just beyond the bounds

of civilized convention —which meant that it was a place for outcasts. Thoreau knew this, and willingly lived

among them, those who had been barred from the inner life of many wealthy suburbs of Boston.

The self-imposed austerity that we often associate with Thoreau’s tree-hugging ways was, in fact, a means of

understanding those individuals who had to eke out a meager existence on the outskirts of society. This does not

make Thoreau a saint, but it does suggest an intimate connection between Thoreau’s retreat to the woods and his

ability to understand those suffering under the conditions of oppression.

So who exactly were Thoreau’s neighbors?

As Lemire and Walls discovered in researching Thoreau, these individuals embodied the fraught history of race in

the Americas. Brister Freeman’s sister, Zilpah White, was also a freed slave. After the Declaration of Independence

was defended, she lived on the edge of Thoreau’s famous bean field, the place where he toiled for two years in the

hopes of realizing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” the rare and difficult act of supporting oneself.

Lemire explains that Zilpah White did it without fanfare. She wove linen and made brooms for a living. Arsonists

burned her house down in 1813. She managed to escape the fire, but her dog, cat and chickens died. She rebuilt

her home. But her life —and life for women like her —didn’t have much in common with Rousseau’s Romantic ideal

of the state of nature.

And then there were the pale-faced, redheaded citizens of Walden Woods who didn’t quite get to be white, the Irish.

The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the first half of the 19th century were, for the most part,

ghettoized in the borderlands of society. Thoreau, however, sustained long and meaningful relationships with the

many Irish immigrants who came to live and work on the railroad line near Walden.

Walls discovered that Thoreau met an ailing Irish ditchdigger named Hugh Coyle and offered to show him a clean

spring that ran near Brister’s Hill. But the old man was too sick to make the short trip. He, like so many Irish near

slaves, drank himself to death in abject poverty.

By the time Thoreau came to Walden on July 4, 1845, most of America’s untouchables were gone, but the traces of

former slaves, squatters, immigrants and day laborers were everywhere. John Breed, another impoverished worker

on the outskirts of Concord life, lived in a small house just a stone’s throw from the pond. In Walls’s words, “Local

boys burned it down in 1841.” At the age of 24, Thoreau raced from Concord to watch the fire, and conversed with

Breed’s distraught son the next day. By that time, Breed himself was already dead: he too died drunk on Walden

Road in 1824.

Thoreau was aware of the proverbial “nobodies” who occupied, and in many cases laid claim to, the land that he

would later inhabit. Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased the cheap, mostly unoccupied and abandoned land around

Walden where Thoreau would make his famous home from Thomas Wyman, a potter. Emerson would soon after

invite Thoreau to build his writer’s retreat on this acreage. But before he did so, in April 1845, Thoreau bought the

shanty of James Collins, a man who, Walls says, was an “Irish railroad worker moving up the line.” Thoreau paid

$4.25 for the house (about $150 today). At dawn, the Collinses moved out, all of their belongings wrapped tidily in a

small single parcel. Thoreau disassembled their shanty, bleached the boards, and used them to construct his cabin

in the woods.

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” —Thoreau embraced Spartan living as a matter of choice, but the irony of him

tearing down a shed in pursuit of his much-celebrated modest way of life is a bit painful. It’s easy for us to judge

Thoreau today; the privileged white man who plays at living austerely (choosing some “alternative way of life” that

has been imposed on others) is a familiar target. But Thoreau himself was aware of this. Walls, for example,

believes that Thoreau was probably helping the Collins family escape a lien on their house.

Thoreau recognized that he had every advantage; he also knew that the disadvantaged went, generally speaking,

unnoticed by people of privilege. Social justice was in no small part a matter of counteracting this myopia, of

recognizing suffering of others hidden in plain sight.

For Thoreau, what keeps the rich from understanding the plight of the poor is, in part, the fact of their richness,

their stuff: not just metaphorically or conceptually, but literally. It’s hard to understand the inner lives of others if

you’re always going shopping or looking after your household business or rushing off to parties. To “live

deliberately,” in Thoreau’s words, was to wrest oneself from the diversions of this rat race, to understand the

difference between the seemingly urgent matters of spending and acquiring and the truly significant ones of

caring and thinking.

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,” Thoreau instructs us. “Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”

To be free from the distractions of modern life —of the endlessly diverting display of the ordinary, social world of

stuff, stuff and more stuff —allowed a person to focus and think. What could we think if worldly possessions didn’t

occupy our thoughts? What and whom could we attend to if we stopped attending only to ourselves?

Thoreau is often portrayed as a hermit, a lonely individual who rejected all forms of community. He was, in truth,

happy enough to abandon the formalities and luxuries of conventional life, but only in an attempt to participate in a

wider natural and social order.

This was a man who communed with the trees, spoke to bean fields, and conspired with the rain and sunshine that

fed his crops. Yes, he had woodland friends. Many of his human companions were equally unusual: John Breed’s

son, a day laborer, who lamented the destruction of his boyhood home; Perez Blood, the eccentric astronomer who

Thoreau visited repeatedly on the outskirts of town; Sophia Foord, the brilliant spinster who fell in love with the one

man, Thoreau, who rivaled her in peculiarity; the unnamed fugitive slave whom Thoreau escorted to the railroad

station so that he could make safe passage to Canada. Countless others.

Part of embracing Thoreauvian wilderness is to open ourselves to individuals and groups who exist beyond the

town limits. These were outsiders, unknowns, even outcasts, and Thoreau acquainted himself with them, came to

understand them and spent part of his life caring for them. Thoreau entreats us to open our eyes to everyone. If he

appears reclusive perhaps it is because we fail to see the significance of his companions —it is perhaps because

we are not ourselves reclusive enough, or, for that matter, social enough in the Thoreau’s peculiarly intimate way.

In 1945, a century after Thoreau made his home on the banks of Walden Pond, Ralph Ellison began to write

“Invisible Man.” “I am an invisible man,” Ellison’s black narrator explains. “I am a man of substance, of flesh and

bone, fiber and liquids —and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because

people refuse to see me.”

This refusal, whether conscious or not, is nonetheless, strategic: a way to superficially erase the injustice that

silently underpins progress and affluence. The Native Americans of the Merrimack Valley vanished first to make

way for the settlers —then the workers and slaves who supported the nation and the even-then-affluent Concord.

What remains is the myth of the rugged, forward-looking individual fitted precisely to a country that would rather

not retrace its questionable history. This, however, was never Thoreau.

“There are few things “in this world as dangerous as sleepwalkers,” Ellison wrote. Eyes closed, oblivious to the

world, they proceed at their own peril, but more tragically, the peril of invisible others. If you rise before the sun and

travel to Walden Pond, it is easy to understand the advantages of keeping your eyes open. We must, according to

Thoreau, “reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn,

which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep.”

To take Thoreau’s example, however, is not simply a matter of appreciating the natural world, of taking careful note

of every woodchuck and birch. It also involves looking into the trees, into the near darkness, to discern the hidden,

human figures who silently abide there. And slowly disappear.

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments ,” an anthology of essays from The Times’s

philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter , and sign up for the Opinion Today

newsletter .

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly

identified Walden Pond as a national park. It is a Massachusetts state park and a Registered National Historic

Landmark.

Source URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/opinion/thoreaus-invisible-neighbors-at-

walden.html?partner=bloomberg

Credit: JOHN KAAG and CLANCY MARTIN DETAILS

Subject: 19th century

People: Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82)

Identifier / keyword: Philosophy Race and Ethnicity Books and Literature Thoreau, Henry David Ellison,

Ralph Emerson, Ralph Waldo Walden Pond (Concord, Mass) Self-Reliance (Book)

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/opinion/thoreaus-invisible-neighbors-at-

walden.html?partner=bloomberg

Publication title: New York Times (Online); New York

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Publication year: 2017

Publication date: Jul 10, 2017

Section: opinion

Publisher: New York Times Company

Place of publication: New York

Country of publication: United States, New York

Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States

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Language of publication: English

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ProQuest document ID: 1917275670

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Last updated: 2017-08-28

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