Walden

Walden is Henry David Thoreau’s memoir of the two years, two months, and two days that he spent at a cabin in rural Massachusetts, with a goal “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach…to learn what are the gross necessaries of life.” Thoreau's book has its charms. It has an impressive style, with intricate prose and a consistency of vision that is sometimes enchanting. This is apparent in Thoreau’s constant search for a higher truth, one that has a Proustian attention to detail — “forever on the alert…looking always at what is to be seen.” It also comes across in the sections describing the natural world around Walden Pond, which make up some of the best parts of the book:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

Unfortunately too much of Walden is comprised of Thoreau’s insufferable advice on the merits of an extreme form of asceticism, one that leaves little room for some of the richest sources of pleasure in life. Thoreau’s vision of the good life excludes not just tobacco, coffee and alcohol, but also music (“even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome.”), companionship (“to be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”), and even wealth (“farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.”). Such a life may be survivable, but it is one barely worth living. And in case you think Thoreau is merely making a humble suggestion for a life of moderation, he frequently displays a breathtaking arrogance:

Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me.

The hairshirt nature of Thoreau’s philosophy might be easier to overlook if its effect on readers had not been so deep and pernicious. Thoreau's puritanical vision has been embraced by certain modern audiences who seem to enjoy denying pleasure to themselves and others. And despite a fundamentally individualistic and atomistic view of the world that would seem to be at odds with progressivism, Walden has influenced large segments of the liberal/left in their misguided objections to “globalization” and praise for localism. 

Obviously Walden is an enormously influential book and at times it is quite beautifully written. But its overall philosophy is undeveloped, contradictory and ultimately a poor vision of how one should live.