Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

20. Leaving Walden

84 verso runningfoot 2 0 . L e a v i n g W a l d e n Walden’s celebration of Thoreau’s glorious twenty-six months in the woods leaves almost all of its readers with a stark question: why did he choose to leave? The book’s “Conclusion,” of course, offers one explanation, but its laconic offhandness has never proved very satisfying: I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. (217) “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there”—what could that sentence mean? In “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau had already spelled out his reason for going to the pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach” (65). With its senses of care, consideration, and unhurriedness, deliberately does a lot of work in that passage, endowing Thoreau’s move to the woods with the aura of an existential choice. As he set about finishing Walden, Thoreau had certainly come to recognize that choice as the decisive one of his life, the one that had given him the most immediate happiness and prompted the writing that would establish his reputation. That decision had not been hasty. Thoreau had been thinking for some time about withdrawing from Concord society and his parents ’ house, if only for some privacy (his mother took in borders). L recto runningfoot 85 He wanted no part of communal experiments like Brook Farm. He began to settle on Walden Pond, familiar to him since childhood, but even after Emerson’s offer of the land he had purchased in the fall of 1844, the actual move required nearly four full months of preparation , devoted mainly to clearing the ground and building the cabin. Thus, by implying that his sudden decision to leave the woods simply matched the original impulse to go there, Thoreau is being disingenuous . While his departure seems as abrupt as the sentences that announce it (“Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847” [214]), the arrival had been anything but. Even Walden’s vague explanation for his departure seems more decisive than the corresponding Journal entry, where the sudden abandonment of his hard-won solitude seems unintelligible even to Thoreau himself: But Why I changed—? Why I left the woods? I do not think I can tell. I have often wished myself back—I do not know any better how I ever came to go there—. Perhaps it is none of my business— even if it is yours. Perhaps I wanted a change—There was a little stagnation it may be—about 2 o’clock in the afternoon the world’s axle—creaked as if it needed greasing—as if the oxen labored—& could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day—Perhaps if I lived there much longer I might live there forever—One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms. (J, 22 January 1852) By suppressing the crucial phrase, “I have often wished myself back,” Thoreau was simply continuing his practice of removing from Walden’s final version any hints of self-doubt or melancholy. In another elided passage, he made explicit this working procedure: “I will tell him [the reader] this secret, if he will not abuse my confidence —I put the best face on the matter.” But wouldn’t “the best face on the matter” of his departure have simply been to mention its immediate cause, a request from the Emersons that Thoreau resume living in their house while Ralph was lecturing in Europe? During the seven years between his leaving the woods and Walden’s appearance, while he worked over its multiple drafts, leaving walden 85 86 verso runningfoot Thoreau had certainly begun to acknowledge that he had passed the high-water mark of his life. In 1851, he confided to his journal: Methinks my present experience is nothing; my past experience is all in all, I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with...