The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Emily Brontк is an original. She had, it is true, read a few of the romantic poets and Gothic romancers of her time, but Wuthering Heights owes little to them. It is also true that she may have received some real-life stimulus, when composing her novel, from the crazy love affair through which Branwell was passing at the time. But at bottom the origins of this strange book are untraceable. It was spewed up out of a vol- canic, untrained, uncritical, but marvelous imagination. It had no true forebears. It has had no true successors.

C.F.

80

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

1817-1862

Walden, Civil Disobedience

Thoreau seems to have spent much of his life talking to him­self; since his death he has been talking to millions. Perhaps, indeed, hundreds of millions, for the program of Gandhi (who influenced Martin Luther King) and at one time the politics of the British Labour Party were both profoundly affected by Thoreaifs ideas. Now, far more than a century after his death, it is safe to say that Walden (with which we may group Civil Disobedience) is one of the most influential books not only of its century, but of ours. Today, defying everything our evolving technocultural society lives by, it speaks to us more urgently than ever. It and Huckleberry Finn [92] are probably the two central American statements in our literature. If I add that Thoreau^ prose is as enjoyable, as crackling, as witty, as full of sap as any yet produced on this continent, I shall have listed the essential reasons for reading Walden and as many other of the major essays as you care to try.

Thoreau had no time to waste in making money. Early in life he decided to do not what society suggested for him, but what he himself wanted. At various times he earned his bare keep by schoolmastering, surveying, pencil-making, gardening, and manual labor. He also appointed himself to certain jobs such as inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms. He wrote tire- lessly (this man was no idler—he worked harder than any fifty leading board chairmen), mainly at a vast journal, some of it still in manuscript. From his books and journalism he earned little. His first book was printed in an edition of one thousand copies, of which fewer than three hundred were sold. He remarked, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred vol­umes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.^,> He spent his life in occasional converse with Emerson [69] and the avail- able Concord literati and transcendentalists; more often talk- ing to hunters, trappers, farmers, and other plain folk who lived close to the natural world he loved; most often with him­self, tramping the woods and fields around his home, noting, with two of the sharpest eyes that ever existed, the behavior of the earth, water, and air, of which our lives seemed to him extensions; and at ali moments thinking.

He really lived the life Emerson so beautifully preached, of self-reliance, nonconformity, simplicity, plain living, and high thinking. Of externai events there were few: a pallid, unsuccess- ful romance (there is no question that, though Thoreau was a great man, he was a defective male); the two crucial years at Walden Pond, where he built a house for twenty-eight dollars and fended almost completely for himself; the overnight jailing for a refusal to pay his poli tax to what he considered an immoral government; his brave public defense of John Brown.

Thoreau needs little commentary; he is an expert at explaining himself. But let there be no misunderstanding: This man is dangerous. He is not a revolutionary but something far more intense—a radical, almost in the sense that Jesus was. He does not, like Marx, want to overturn society. He would say that Marxs life-denying state is no better than any other life- denying state. He simply opposed himself to the whole trend of his time, as well as to that of ours, whose shape he foresaw. By withdrawal, he set his face against invention, the machine, motion, industry, progress, material things, associations, togetherness, cities, strong government. He said it ali in one word: Simplify. But if that word were taken by ali of us as liter- ally as Thoreau himself took it, our civilization would be trans- formed overnight.

Knowing that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet despera- tion" (how often the phrase is quoted nowadays), he deter- mined to live entirely by his own lights, in fact to live rather than to adjust, accumulate, join, reform, or compete. His pri­vate notion of living may not appeal to those of us who lack his genius for enjoying and interpreting nature; but the force of his general doctrine of the meaning of human life does not rest on the private notion.