Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

7. Death

recto runningfoot 33 7 . D e at h WaldenlivesupalmostentirelytothepurposeThoreauannounces in the epigraph: “I do not intend to write an ode to dejection.” (5) However varied his moods may have been during the book’s nineyear gestation, Thoreau produced a consistently optimistic work by sticking to a strict compositional plan: “I put the best face on the matter.” As a result, in the midst of so much high spirits, the famous penultimate paragraph of “Where I Lived and What I lived For” seems not only obscure but unexpected: If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimiter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. (70) Thoreau had written like this before. Using the same odd phrase, “to front a fact,” he had previously imagined his enterprise as another kind of life-and-death struggle: The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or further still, between him and it. Let him build D 34 verso runningfoot a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can. (Week, 304) The two passage’s similarities, the verbal and thematic repetitions—if these things weren’t enough, Geoffrey O’Brien observes that “when Thoreau combines italic and upper-case letters in a single phrase, you know that a critical juncture has been reached.” But why would Thoreau include this apocalyptic passage, with its evocation of the death rattle, in Walden? Almost every study of Thoreau treats as decisive his older brother ’s sudden death from tetanus in January 1842. Indeed, the “private business” (17) Thoreau announces as the purpose of his Walden experiment was initially the completion of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, intended as a memorial to John, with whom he had taken that canoe trip. John had been only twenty-six when he died, and Thoreau had been so stricken with grief that he had developed psychosomatic lockjaw, complete with all the apparently fatal symptoms. In 1849, Thoreau also watched his thirty-six-yearold sister Helen slowly die from tuberculosis, the family disease that would eventually kill him. These events encouraged a new urgency in Thoreau, imposing an existential imperative to settle once and for all what really mattered to him. Almost seventy years earlier, Samuel Johnson had offered his famous dictum, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Thoreau wasn’t going to be hanged, but having seen up close how short a life could be, he went to Walden determined “to live deliberately , to front only the essential facts of life” (that phrase again) and “see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (65). Thoreau’s acquaintance with death almost certainly prompted the intensity of Walden’s opening chapters, written as he was finishing the Week and thus preoccupied by John’s memory. The stirring clarion phrases, designed to wake himself and his neighbors up, issue from the Thoreau who once defined as “good” those “sentences uttered with your back to the wall” (J, 12 November 1851): 34 d recto runningfoot 35 But men labor under a mistake. . . . [T]hey are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it. (7) What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. . . . As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. (8) In the long run...