Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

31. Ruins

recto runningfoot 123 3 1 . R u i n s In “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors,” Thoreau observes, “I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy,” a statement that provokes a creed: Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there. (178) Walden, however, a book so full of allusions that it requires extensive footnotes, is itself an edifice “constructed on the site of a more ancient city,” the “heroic books” (71) Thoreau so often celebrates. In his repudiation of the Old World’s cities and his desire for a fresh start, Thoreau is typically American. But his reverence for older writers and their sacred texts, his devotion to learning, resemble a classicist ’s deference. By using the boards from James Collins’s shanty for his own cabin, Thoreau had shown that he could build something new—something better, cleaner, more “economical”—out of something old. In building Walden, he intended to do the same thing. Emerson recalled having once asked Thoreau, “Who would not like to write something we can all read, like Robinson Crusoe?” Thoreau appears to have seized on this offhand remark. Although he boasted that he had “never read a novel,” he almost certainly had read Robinson Crusoe, mentioned not only in his Journal (J, 22 February 1841), but also in the Week (290) and “Ktaadn.” Walden contains the obvious Crusoe reference (“I have been anxious to improve the nick 124 verso runningfoot of time, and notch it on my stick too” [14]), but more importantly, it minimizes accounts of Thoreau’s near-daily visits to town, thereby painting a picture of “heroic” solitude. Thoreau, in other words, used Defoe’s novel as the foundation for his own structure. In Cato the Elder’s classic treatise on farming, De re rustica, Thoreau found an even more immediate foundation for Walden. Thoreau acknowledged Cato’s text as “my ‘Cultivator’” (60), and he thoroughly relied on it. Thoreau’s opening salvo, “Economy,” with its attack on business and the accepted professions, follows Cato’s preface dismissing trade as an insecure occupation prone to disaster . Yet both authors apply a scrupulously businesslike approach to their own accounts: Thoreau’s itemized expenditures seem modeled on Cato’s detailed list of supplies and expenses. As Thoreau would do in Walden, Cato structured De re rustica around the seasons, ending with spring. This organizing principle became the frame for Cato’s practical philosophical advice, which often sounds Thoreauvian: “In rain, look for work to be done indoors. Rather than do nothing, do cleaning. Remember that the establishment will cost just as much if nothing is done.” Cato’s culminating advice about the benefits of cabbage seems to have stuck in Thoreau’s head: to appreciate the “health-giving properties of cabbage,” Cato advised, “you must first know the different kinds of cabbage and their nature,” for cabbage is “at once dry and wet.” When Emerson used part of his eulogy to criticize Thoreau’s paradoxes as “a trick,” he offered an example: “It was so dry,” he recalled him saying, “that you might call it wet. (with Brenda Maxey-Billings and Daniel O’Malley) 124 R ...