Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

29. Readers

118 verso runningfoot 2 9 . R e a d e r s Because Walden’s growing popularity has often derived from Thoreau’s advocacy of certain issues, especially civil disobedience and environmentalism, we have tended to avoid a central problem: what is Thoreau’s relationship to his readers? It’s not an easy question to answer. Walden is at once inspirational and demoralizing, revelatory and boring, practical and quixotic; and Thoreau himself appears as a prophet, companion, scold, laborer, idler, eccentric, businessman, braggart, nature lover, and instructor. What reader is sufficiently thorough (to evoke his name’s Concord pronunciation ) to accommodate all these attitudes and roles? Walden, in other words, not only represents Thoreau’s solution to his own problem of writing; it also poses a problem of reading: who can read Walden correctly? Walden is an instruction manual, but it is also a sermon, offering the standard fire-and-brimstone rebuke before its summons to the True Way. “There is not one of my readers,” Thoreau announces, “who has yet lived a whole human life” (223), a relatively mild invective compared to others, where general propositions snap suddenly into direct address: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. (8–9) R recto runningfoot 119 In other places, Thoreau skips the indirection: “It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live,” he admonishes. And he does not spare himself: “Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life,” he asks of his pseudonym “John Farmer,” “when a glorious existence is possible for you?” (151). At times, he despairs of all humanity: “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” (64). In the face of this condition, Thoreau offers a preacher’s typically strenuous moral: “Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome” (150). Like all good sermons, however, Walden offers a regimen of salvation and a promise of glory: “I learned this, at least by my experiment ,” Thoreau concludes; “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” (217). While Thoreau’s churchgoing contemporaries would almost certainly have recognized Walden’s appropriations of the sermon’s tone, they would have been discomforted by the book’s secular conclusion that “heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads” (190), that “Olympus is but the outside of the earth every where” (61). Now, in this post-Nietzschean world, it is Thoreau’s regimen that troubles us: “Our lives must be stripped” (29). Thoreau went about the stripping : he had no wife, no children, no regular job; from his diet, he eliminated meat, fish, salt, sugar, yeast, coffee, tea, and wine. (Some speculation suggests that malnourishment may have contributed to his tuberculosis.) He kept his clothes and shoes until they wore out. In Walden, he proposes that a man could live comfortably in one of the six-by-three-feet boxes where railroad workers stored their tools, and after insisting that “this did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative,” he assures his readers that “I am far from jesting” (23). Thoreau’s impossible austerity has its precedent in Jesus’s uncompromising warning: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14: 26). In “Walking,” a posthumously published essay that began as an 1851 lecture , Thoreau would echo those words: readers 119 120 verso runningfoot If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister , and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk. It’s an impossible requirement, and the practical New England businessmen who heard it preached on Sunday knew how to forget it during the week. Christianity’s general tenets may have remained alive...