Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

22. Name

recto runningfoot 91 2 2 . N a m e Although Walden has always been attributed to Henry David Thoreau , its author was actually christened David Henry Thoreau. At some point after college, Thoreau simply reversed the order of his first two names, perhaps to accommodate his parents’ habit of calling him Henry, perhaps as an early exercise in self-determination. This step, which accepts the given as an occasion for rearrangement, provides the key to Walden. Walden’s reputation as a near-sacred text often provokes disappointment in its readers. If we expect the book to reveal the meaning of life, we may feel let down by its lessons, which, when paraphrased and stripped of Thoreau’s elevated prose, can seem platitudinous: life is what you make of it! Reduce your needs, and you can work less! Nature is beautiful! In fact, however, Walden proposes that the secret to living well depends not on the discovery of some hidden truth but rather on rearranging what already lies before us. Thoreau doesn’t propose to reinvent civilization from scratch; he simply reorders its existing components. This process, outlined in “Economy,” involves the promotion of fundamental needs over inessential luxuries , reversing the unnatural order he detects in his neighbors’ lives. As early as 1837, in his Harvard commencement address (“The Commercial Spirit”), Thoreau had revealed his readiness to shake up even a biblical dispensation: “The order of things should be somewhat reversed,” he had announced. “The seventh day should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” In Walden, the N 92 verso runningfoot ratio of leisure to work has increased: “I found that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living” (50). Suggesting the continuity of his ideas, Thoreau’s conclusion uses the language of his Harvard speech: “It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do” (52). This faith in rearrangement explains Walden’s celebration of getting lost: it loosens the hold of habitual perception, typically regarded by Thoreau as deadening. Thus, his narrative of a night return to his cabin (“It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose” [117]) results in a lesson about the advantages of disorientation: It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time. Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia . . . . [N]ot till we are completely lost, or turned around . . . do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. . . . Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (117–18) Wittgenstein’s philosophical method would repeat Thoreau’s move: “Problems are solved,” he observed, “not by reporting new experience, but by arranging what we have always known.” Wittgenstein compared this activity to rearranging books on a shelf, observing that “the onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think . . . that nothing at all has been achieved.— The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.” The kinds of hopes aroused by Walden for some previously unimagined revelation inhibit our ability to appreciate Thoreau’s lesson. “One of the greatest hindrances to philosophy,” Wittgenstein insisted, “is the expectation of new, unheard of discoveries.” “We have only to put together in the right way what we know, without adding anything, and the satisfaction we are trying to get from explanation comes 92 n recto runningfoot 93 of itself.” “Nature puts no questions and answers none” (189), Thoreau concludes. “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” (190). Nothing important is hidden; we simply have to see what lies all around us: The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather, from dark and...