in defense of thoreau

A friendly post for Dr Hillman: Basically because I didn't have anything else to do. :)

Henry Thoreau is sometimes criticized (by Dr Hillman and others) for living alone by a pond and writing about the importance of nature - but going into town and getting pies from his mother and supplies from the shops. His connection to town life makes his devotion to a natural, close-to-the-earth life seem shallow. But - he was not shallow at all... because he met his goal, his dream, completely, and did not do anything insincere.

Thoreau never claimed that he was setting out to live completely away from society, or that he was going to rely completely on the natural world. He did not advocate man's return to 'savagery', but instead wanted men to acknowledge the uncivilized part of themselves and embrace this as a part of man connected wholly to the natural world. However, he also gave tribute to the civilized part of man's nature. He wanted to realize the uncivilized part of himself as a means of exploring his inner self, of truly knowing himself and understanding his own nature. An awareness of the uncivilized, untamed part would make the civilized part more enlightened - wiser.

But it was not the untamed that Thoreau strove for as his life's work. Many have an image of Thoreau as gruff and angry - and he could be these things - but more often he was not. His friends, family, and the townspeople of Concord mostly knew him as basically a kind man. He made popcorn over the stove for Emerson's young children and put gloves on Lydia Emerson's chickens to prevent them from ruining the rose-bushes. He and his family (parents and two sisters) hid runaway slaves in their homes; Henry nursed a wounded runaway back to health.

Aside from this side of him, he did have a rightfully angry side that came out as Thoreau the abolitionist and anti-war proponent. This side of him can be seen in speeches and essays like "A Plea for Captain John Brown" and, of course, "Resistance to Civil Government", later renamed "Civil Disobedience". However, Thoreau's anger manifested itself as a call to his fellow men to live out the principles necessary to support the causes of abolition and pacifism --- like his experiment at Walden called others to also simplify their lives into what they really dreamed of.

It would have been a meainglessly meanspirited and gruff thing to do for Thoreau to cut himself off from his family and friends and townspeople and live in isolation as a method of becoming closer to nature. This is what some think Thoreau set out to do, when really he did not. He did want to become closer to nature, but he had already been close to nature all his life and did not have to cast off society to do it.

Thoreau was not, like most of his transcendentalist fellows, setting out to convert all of society to his way, either. His "experiment" of living in the cabin at Walden was only a fulfillment of his own dream, not meant as an example for others, which he was sure to state in Walden.

Many other transcendentalists, like Bronson Alcott, were more interested than Thoreau in reverting back to a more untamed society - and hoping that such a society would flourish and become mainstream. Utopian communities like Brook Farm and Fruitlands sprung up all over nineteenth-century America, as thinkers set out to build new societies based on ideas like farming and living off of the land only, assigning each person only a job which he was suited to do, and eliminating manual labor in favor of thought.

Several times in his life, Thoreau was invited to join these communes, but every time he unhesitatingly and sharply refused. He did not believe in these utopian communities because he did believe in hard work and in living as a part of real society instead of running away from it. Thus, it only makes sense that, although Thoreau wished to live among nature and by himself in the woods, he also remained involved in town life. He valued courage and did not want to run away from the problems of society by rejecting society completely. Instead, he tried to live according to his dreams - what he thought of as independence - and hoped to improve in this way. His philosophy did not support wholly rejecting elements of society like economy and government and the Concord stores - instead, he wanted only to realize that these things are extra and not essential parts of real, natural life.

Besides, it would have been quite rude to refuse to take something like a lovely pie that his own mother had made for him, wouldn't it? Refusing a pie seems, after all, nine times out of ten, a sign of haughtiness! And the blindly utopian philosophy of his contemporaries was one of the things Thoreau wanted most to avoid.