Why Thoreau Matters

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Below are all the writings from our readers and others on Henry David Thoreau, one of The Atlantic’s most illustrious contributors.

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Chris Bodenner

9:30 PM / October 25, 2015

Why Thoreau Matters

Many readers are responding to our look back at Atlantic essays written by Henry David Thoreau, as well as Kathryn Schulz’s recent smackdown of the transcendentalist writer. Regarding the latter, a reader writes:

I never understood the accusation of “contradiction” of Thoreau. Should we throw away a whole philosophy because he didn’t always practice what he preached? That’s silliness. Also, I think what many people identify as contradictions are in fact misunderstandings of his ideas. For example, he enjoyed solitude and he enjoyed company. Those are not mutually exclusive in life, just at any given moment.

I would never recommend him as a standup comic, but there is humor in his writing. It is all tongue and cheek, but it’s there.

Most of all, Thoreau had far more guts than most people and questioned everything. In a time where people are being squeezed harder and harder financially, and when the latest electronic gadgets are considered to be a necessity rather than a luxury, Thoreau is a must read. He would have raged against our compulsion to respond instantly to every beep and buzz from our phones. Our devices have gone from convenience to burden.

On that note, the photo seen above was taken today by a good friend of mine, “one last pic before I hand over the phone” to begin a long meditation retreat located, as it happens, in the woods of Massachusetts less than an hour from Walden Pond. Another reader provides a meditation of sorts on Thoreau:

Addressing the many points and quotations Schulz’s essay takes out of context goes well beyond the scope of a letter. Instead, I offer this partial counterpoint, perhaps just as willful in its misreadings, but known and felt from years of reading and teaching Walden:

It is near the Ides of October, and, here in the northeast, we’ve begun our annual descent, which has many of us rising in darkness and heading home in twilight. Even as the trees pulse scarlet and yellow, even as the sky is often achingly blue, we feel an inward turn; we tend toward hunker.

All of this is seasonal backdrop for a fractious, troubled world—our politics are those of clamor and calamity, we arm against ourselves, we seem to outnumber the very earth. In such a season, at such a time, many of us search for hope, for a voice that both admits and admires complexity and sees still through the turmoil to the delight of life, to a daily goodness and purpose.

For me and for many, that voice carries over the years from Henry David Thoreau, whose 200th birthday (7/12/17) nears. How is it that a man dubbed by many as misanthropic and hypocritical (The New Yorker touts Schulz’s long essay with the word “hypocrite” bolded in its title), a man often perceived to be a hermit, a man who never “made it” in his era and died young, offers such a lasting uplift for those of us who read him, and then, often follow him out the door?

Perhaps there is a simple answer … with a complex explanation: In his mid-20s, as Henry Thoreau sought purpose and traction in his hoped-for profession as a writer, he took on an assignment for the short-lived transcendental journal, The Dial. In the resulting essay, “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau’s first foray into the style and content that would form his life’s work, he wrote the following passage:

Surely joy is the condition of life. Think of the young fry that leap in the ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by attrition is reflected upon the bank.

Almost 20 years later, as he lay dying at age 44, Thoreau worked on his final essay, “Autumnal Tints”—a look at the leaves and the flaring season that ushers in the annual deaths of the world. A reader might expect dark tints, a gathering gloom; instead, affirmation rises the way light rises, sometimes unexpectedly, from the leaves lying on the dark forest floor. Sometimes in fall, your way is limned by these footlight leaves; light both falls from the sky and rises from the ground; the day is suffused with it. In “Autumnal Tints,” we find that joy is still the condition of life … and, even, death.

That, I think, is Henry Thoreau’s sustaining, daily vision. It survived a world as fractured as ours; it survived also Thoreau’s own ferocious intelligence, capable of such piercing social criticism that it reads as fresh today; it survived every descent, even his own. For all of us “carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon [our] wings,” such a vision can hold daily darkness at bay; we can work forward in its spirit.

More of your emails to come. If you’d like to join them, just say hello@.

Lauren Cassani Davis

2:45 PM / October 23, 2015

Thoreau: An Editor's Nightmare

Philosopher, poet, and pond-dweller Henry David Thoreau occupies an esteemed place in America’s imagination and reading lists. But earlier this week, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz wrote a scathing takedown of the writer, calling him “self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control,” sparking debate across the Internet. So far, my favorite characterization of Thoreau is “a genuine American weirdo,” written by Jedediah Purdy in a rebuttal to Schultz. One reader wrote in response: “I like some Thoreau. Lots of authors are dicks, just like artists of many types. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy their work.” Another reader:

I love Thoreau. What is piggish about living simply and deliberately, not taking more than you need, respecting individual rights, being anti-slavery and practicing Civil Disobedience? I think a lot of it comes down to extroverts being generally put off by anyone who dares to be an introvert.

Email your thoughts here. The Atlantic has a unique stake in this debate, since Thoreau was one of the earliest contributors to the magazine, publishing a number of essays here in the last years of his life. And if that experience is anything to go by, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to be his editor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of The Atlantic’s founders, was also a buddy of Thoreau’s. (Emerson published a tribute to his friend, after his death, here.) As Ellery Sedgwick, the magazine’s eighth editor, writes in A History of The Atlantic Monthly, Emerson encouraged Thoreau to submit a narrative about life in the Maine woods. Among the casualties of the editing process was a single, not-especially-remarkable sentence.

But Thoreau, ever meticulous, was affronted to discover that deletion in the published version of his piece. He wrote an angry letter to the The Atlantic’s founding editor, James Russell Lowell, in June 1858:

I have just noticed that that sentence was, in a very mean and cowardly manner, omitted… I am not willing to be associated in any way, unnecessarily, with parties who will confess themselves so bigoted and timid as this implies. I could excuse a man who was afraid of an uplifted fist, but if one habitually manifests fear at the utterance of a single thought, I must think that his life is a kind of nightmare continued in broad daylight. It is hard to conceive of one so completely derivative. Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?

Luckily, thanks in part to a new editor, James Thomas Fields, The Atlantic convinced Thoreau to publish several more essays in 1862, right before he passed away. Whatever you think about the man himself, these essays—many autumnal-themed—are lovely glimpses into Thoreau’s pastoral world. As he wrote in “Autumnal Tints,”

October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

Also see “Wild Apples,” a portrait of the tree that bears the “noblest of fruits”, and the famous essay “Walking,” in which Thoreau meditates on the virtues of a mind and body free to wander wherever they please.