One hundred and twenty calamitous years have passed since the death of Henry David Thoreau. The cantankerous son-of-a-bitch has survived the rude pryings of theorists and illegitimati who claimed his patron sainthood for causes he would have abhorred, and one suspects he will outdate the vulgarities of Ronald Reagan. A simple explanation for this: Truth certainly outlasts fashion, and one strong voice will silence all manner of faddish cacophonies.
I teach in an institution that may well be one of the few remaining reliquaries of puritanism, slightly adulterated (or perhaps updated) with a dash of Dale Carnegie and a pinch of ersatz Jamesian intellectuality. The Academy is certainly a place Thoreau would have warned healthy-minded people away from, if only for the fact, as he said of his dear Harvard College, that the "economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed." Yet because he is so ill-matched with the bastions of respectability, and because he has a piercing sense that cuts through and x-rays the "mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance," I teach him to children who have been taught exactly the opposite of his common sense, and, delighted, watch the clinquant doubt burst upon their horizons.
The Academy, at first glance, is not a propitious soil for the species Thoreauviansis agitatus. There is too much shade, too much brick and white wood, too much antlike bustle on the paths, too much lucubrating for the junkfood of a grade. There is very little opportunity to drink Nature's beauty in "through every pore," to catch "manna-wise" the turbid breath of spring or the arch silence of winter. The students have a hard time understanding and accepting quiet, are pricked by guilt or bustle whenever they stop, for a moment, to catch the ineffable sound of their own selves running. They feel kin to the man pushing his house and farm and animals and wife down the road, except for them it is a much more nebulous cargo, a fascicle of colleges and future jobs and a greased pig called happiness. In this they reflect the hebetude of the country itself, a depreciation of vision, a distrust of anything not monetarily negotiable, a scurrying chase of egotistical will-o'-the-wisps, a craving for fewer questions and more settling answers: "It's all so nice, what he says, but..."
But I tell them to trust the marrow of the literature. Thoreau is a powerful emetic, the sort that makes us chuck up the apple that Salinger's Teddy says we've all so unwittingly swallowed, the apple of logic and conformity and petty vision. Walden is a skewed book in many ways, but always skewed toward celebration, hope, and a gleeful twitting of the norms. It helps unearth and rejuvenate from the midden of expectation the adolescent's right to rebel and question, and helps nourish the growth that takes one from looking to seeing. It is best read when the glands are at full production, the plain is unusually darkling, the verities are seen as vanities, doubt stalks the halls of the brain. I want my students to think, not merely reason, and Thoreau stirs up their expectations and archives as no other writer can.
To what end? Agreed, doubt for its own sake leads to nihilism, or, worse, a smug existentialism afraid to risk anything, what Stanley Kaufmann calls "New Slick." Thoreau advocates neither, for even as he totes up the debits of his fellows (and he does so, charmingly, in the wild inversion of their own Yankee terms of business), he hymns out the credits to be gained, the interest to be had, in the life surrounding us. Many people see Walden and his other writings as sermons; or as exercises in niggling mysticism; or primers on economics, social theory, natural history; or as pretensions and Gibranisms. All of this misses the mark. He simple invited people with an urgent RSVP to enjoy as fully as possible the dance and banquet of life. He knew quite well how hard people worked to complicate the simple necessities of life, how "shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths," and he honed his wit and his writing talent to slice through all the Gordian knots people tied themselves into. He did this any way he could, never with spleen, never with righteousness or garlanded piety, but always with the full and budding knowledge that there was an available dawn in all of us if only we would gather our forces together and drive away the fog. Thoreau's questioning, his injunction to have "old deeds for old people, new deeds for new," his constant inversion of accepted understandings, his chanticleerian buffoonery, were all aimed to awaken the slumbering bear of our true self, and, by sloughing off the scales, help us move confidently in the direction of our dreams.
Heady stuff. But it corrects the image of Thoreau as a nay-sayer, a garbled idealist who ought to be read but not believed. He required that every thinker be able to give some true account of himself. This was not, as some of my students try to argue, oneupsmanship, the overly-proud pariah telling off the good citizen. It was a challenge, and an easy one at that: one could either do it or not do it. My students are upset by that challenge. They feel they have so little to account for. They begin to see where the reins are tied, have been tied all their lives, and they discover the bit in their mouths. They resent the fact that so much has been hidden from them, that the world they've been groomed to inherit has done little to prepare them to be anything other than subservient caretakers. And perhaps for the first time in their "education" they seriously have to question the values and assumptions that have girdered their lives, and they are scared and uncentered by the task. Thoreau would commiserate, though he'd be cold comfort: each man to his own bean patch.
But he is not one to leave a job unfinished, to rest on metaphorical laurels. When we are in the most stygian depths of that infernal process called "growing up," this Yankee Oriental slips us the coins to make the voyage over to Elysium: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." An effervescent sentence, baldly stated and securely proven by his life experiment at Walden Pond. My students complain that all the Waldens are gone, soon to be waste dumps for Watts' industrialization of the forests. But they soon also see that Walden Pond is an internal affair, a caravan going nowhere but closer to the oasis of the self, and that deep in the jungle of Times Square or a prep school classroom one can advance by a marvelously simple route: enjoy the world, dance as lustily as possible, and keep the family jewels safely guarded.
This agitation cannot be too welcomed by the teacher. Too often here, as in other education institutions, what are offered as logia, the pearls of wisdom, turn out to be olivets, imitation pearls meant to deceive. We are a bookish horde here; the only dirt that touches our hands is library dust. We are reserved spectators, prosecutors of split hairs. Into this dullish community rides Thoreau, the maverick who, in E.B. White's well-woven image, "rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions....[One] is impressed chiefly by the courage of the writer and by how splendid it was that somebody should have ridden in there and raised all that ruckus." Thoreau defined himself pre-eminently as a writer, and he shot off his ideas with tensile and jussive words that, he said, "should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement." He is a constant critic, never wishing for any moment of life to slip into academic prose because he knew quite first-handedly that a "writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words...which have a paralysis in their tails." We chair-sitters and table-banterers would do well to heed the paralysis in our head and tails and try to coin some new advantage for ourselves. The agitation he incites is the agitation of a bursting flower or a leaping dolphin, of "contra-dictions" that harmonize in a usable truth, an injunction to co-ordinate the "bowels and the stars" so that we may never feel abandoned like motes in the glaze of sunlight.
So far, so good. They can see it, grasp it in the tentacles of their left brains, and even concede that Thoreau has something to say. But Thoreau is a testicular yeast, a pituitary gland, and he is not content to simply inhabit a brain cell or two. He knew very well that to "simplify, simplify" carried the battle right to the capitalist aorta of his society. For if a man declares a separate treaty with his government, if he requires that a government respect him before he respects the government, if he insists that any institutional approach is inevitably tainted morally, he is a danger, because a man with ideas is more threatening than a man with guns. This strikes right to the core of the democratic ideology they took in with their Similac, the belief in the right of the majority, the social contract, the power of the vote. And it strikes right into their dorm rooms, dashes the papers and books from the shelves, and firmly asks, "What price will you pay for your freedom?" For Thoreau's thought is inseparable from action, and while part of that action may be a full life in Nature, part of it is also being a solid counter-friction to the machinery of conformity, economic dilution, and social propaganda. The enjoyable crank, the costermonger of mystic natural delights, is also a man who demands a hard eye cast on life and on death, a firm two-footed stand against all that is unjust and infirm and immoral.
Thoreau would find fertile abundance in Mr. Reagan's America for another Walden. But, as he would say, it's all been said before. Only now he would realize too that it must be said more loudly than before, that we are in too much danger of taking ourselves solemnly, and that, more than ever, we need to clear up the cataracts and get down to the business of living. He can only say that by proxy; we no longer have his shambling figure to consult. I hope my students fit some of that bill, that they molt out of their Academy drab plumage and, phoenix-like, rise to seek where a suitable ground for being might be. He is a good companion, regardless of how his hedgehog personality pricks our pieties, and his invitation still stands.