My Walden

Reading Walden this week felt like taking a mini-vacation for me. Not that I’m as big a fan of Thoreau as I am of Austen, although his little jokes do crack me up, but I have another connection to Walden Pond and Thoreau than this class.

I have a sorority sister who lives in suburb of Boston that I used to visit at least once a year, usually on St. Patrick’s Day, and for a week we’d bop around the surrounding areas and sightsee. The first year I visited her was for my first St. Pat’s Day in Boston. Rolling with an Irish family full of cops in Boston on March 17 is a singularly entertaining experience. J 

During the week I stayed there I wanted to see as much as I could because I didn’t know if I would ever be able to go back. We went to Salem and Concord to do the witch-hunt and the Transcendentalist thing. I grew up reading books by Louisa May Alcott and once I got older, her children’s books led me to her novels for adults and her father’s writings. The Alcott’s led me into other Transcendentalist authors, including Emerson and Thoreau. Once I knew I would be visiting Concord, I knew I had to see Orchard House and Walden Pond.

As I was reading Walden, I kept envisioning the place I visited. Even as a tourist attraction it is peaceful and imparts that sense of vitality and fertility that Muir and Thoreau talk about in their writing. I remember the first time that I read that Walden was not written out in the wilderness. Like many others, when I was reading I assumed that Thoreau cut off most of his contact with the outside world and that he was somewhere without contact with the “modern” world. I remember feeling disappointed, as though I had been lied to.

After re-reading I feel like maybe I wasn’t so at fault for thinking that he was off on his own away from everywhere and everything. The text lends itself to the trope of “the man off in the woods”. This reminded me of the nature that isn’t natural idea that we’ve been reading and talking about this quarter. Walden is written as though Thoreau is one man who retreats from the world and into the forest and when he comes out he has been enlightened and has this amazing account to share with the world. This is that fictional nature idea. He wasn’t far from other people or civilization, he only gave up those luxuries that it amused him to do without. His account came from a journal that he revised over and over; it’s not the divinely inspired account that it seems at time. I’ve been having a problem with the idea of “fake nature” but after connecting that idea with my memories of Walden, I’m not sure that it’s such a big problem anymore. That this little bit of pastoral beauty was preserved because someone wrote a sort of fantasy of the wild is okay with me.

 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience the pond in three of four seasons. You haven’t lived until you’ve hiked around the pond while inhaling snow during a blizzard. The blazing colors in the fall and the vibrant greens and blues of the summer setting will be something that I never forget. The fact that I was able to experience a bit of this pastoral/rural fantasy because of the pretense of the wild makes me only grateful that Thoreau and Muir wrote what they did. This pretense and the fiction of other “wild” spaces (like National Parks) seem essential to preservation and conservation in this modern, capitalistic society. That pretense allows a value to be placed on the wild and if that’s the only way to save places like these, I think I need to come to an uneasy truce with the practice. I’ll settle for this approach at least until public opinion changes or becomes more enlightened and the reason to preserve “nature” need only be that it exists and not for what it can provide to humans.