Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

8. Distance

36 verso runningfoot 8 . D i s ta n c e Despite its reputation as a remote sanctuary, Thoreau’s cabin was only a mile and a half from Emerson’s door, less than a mile and three quarters from his own family’s house, and barely six hundred yards from the Fitchburg railroad’s tracks. To what extent does this proximity to the very civilization disowned by Walden invalidate the book? If Stanley Cavell is right that Thoreau’s “problem is not to learn what to say to his neighbors” but “his right to declare it,” is that right undermined by the surprising lack of distance between him and his neighbors? For some Walden readers, captivated by the idea of a heroic retreat from society, the discovery that Thoreau walked into town almost daily, often dined at home, and regularly entertained visitors seems a betrayal. Thoreau, of course, anticipates that response, insisting that the distance that matters is the one separating us from our better selves and that bridging this gulf requires the real heroism. “Is not our own interior white on the chart?” he asks in his “Conclusion,” urging his reader to “be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought” (215). Wittgenstein would propose the same project in the same terms: “If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don’t have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.” Nevertheless, Thoreau must have remained aware that his physical proximity to Concord might discredit his experiment. Eager to avoid appearing like a boy camping out, he paints a bolder selfportrait : recto runningfoot 37 Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system. . . . I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. . . . at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. (63) There is some truth to this picture. In the middle of the nineteenth century, long before the comforting electric glow that now comes from the nearby village, Walden’s woods on a moonless night would have seemed impenetrably dark. Returning to his cabin after an evening in town, Thoreau reports having “to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn,” for “it is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose” (117). In choosing solitude, Thoreau had further made himself exceptional: in 1850, only thirteen of Concord’s twenty-three hundred residents were living by themselves , nearly all widows or spinsters, alone out of necessity rather than choice. And yet the distance problem—or rather the lack of it—remains. It’s hard to think of another major American literary work capable of being so easily discredited by information about its author. Huckleberry Finn doesn’t become a lesser book when we discover that Twain wrote it in Hartford; The Red Badge of Courage doesn’t collapse because Stephen Crane hadn’t experienced combat. Only Hemingway and Frost, who worked so hard to make their books seem extensions of their lives, come anywhere close to being as vulnerable . “Thoreau’s work disconcerts most by its lack of clear boundaries ,” Geoffrey O’Brien argues. “You begin by reading a book and find that you have crossed over into a life.” But surely that diagnosis does not apply only to Walden: it would describe almost any memoir purporting to be truthful. Thoreau’s distance problem, in other words, is a genre issue, responsive to an easy remedy: if he had called Walden “a novel,” no one would care how often he went to town. Simply designating any account as “fictional” erects a protective bulkhead between the work and its author: think how often faked holocaust memoirs get “cured” by being renamed “novels.” distance 37 38 verso runningfoot But Thoreau wouldn’t take the easy way out, and he had his reasons . “I never read a novel,” he once declared. “They have so little real life and thought in them.” He was willing to hold himself to the standard...