Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

33. Stripped

recto runningfoot 129 3 3 . S t r i p p e d Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped. (29) Walden’s more didactic sections, especially its first two chapters, repeatedly erase the distinction between practical issues and philosophy . This move, of course, lies at the heart of Thoreau’s project, announced early in “Economy”: “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school. . . . It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically” (13). With Thoreau, there is no necessary priority: either the practical or the philosophical issue can come first. Thus, the task of building a house with boards from James Collins’s shanty prompts an introductory disquisition on architecture, which, in turn, abruptly becomes a moral precept: “Our lives must be stripped.” Emerson dismissively suggested that Thoreau found it easy to follow his own maxim: “He had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles,” Emerson wrote in his eulogy. “He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the state; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco.” Even to his most sympathetic readers, Thoreau’s life has always seemed remarkably “stripped.” Less apparent, however, is the extent to which Thoreau also “stripped” Walden. After promising “a simple and sincere account” of his own life at the pond, Thoreau offers a book whose lack of intimacy continues to unsettle us. 130 verso runningfoot Thoreau tells few stories, admits to no doubts. He never uses Emerson ’s name or mentions his own family. Anecdotes about the Collinses ’ family cat or a hunted fox trail off into dead ends, while others about an “artist of Kouroo” or “a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove ” become opaque parables. Because we have grown so accustomed to Walden’s remoteness, we may realize what Thoreau has left out only when we happen upon a Journal entry registering his characteristic mood swings: For a day or two it has been quite cool, a coolness that was felt even when sitting by an open window in a thin coat on the west side of the house in the morning, and you naturally sought the sun at that hour. The coolness concentrated your thought, however . . . . I feel as if this coolness would do me good. If it only makes my life more pensive! Why should pensiveness be akin to sadness? There is a certain fertile sadness which I would not avoid, but rather earnestly seek. It is positively joyful to me. It saves my life from being trivial. . . . This coolness comes to condense the dews and clear the atmosphere. The stillness seems more deep and significant. Each sound seems to come from out a greater thoughtfulness in nature. . . . My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods. I, whose life was but yesterday so desultory and shallow, suddenly recover my spirits, my spirituality. . . . Ah! if I could so live that there should be no desultory moment in all my life! . . . [T]hat I could match nature always with my moods! (J, 17 August 1851) Thoreau’s refusal “to write an ode to dejection” (5) insured that such wistful confessions of even fleeting melancholy could find no place in his book. At some point, he seems to have decided that the goal of waking his neighbors up was simply incompatible with any acknowledgment of irresolution. He had to pretend, as Robert Louis Stevenson said of him, that “the needle did not tremble as with richer natures, but pointed steadily north.” Thus, Walden presents Thoreau ’s decisions as the inevitable result of a moral imperative, not as a stage in his own interior struggle. The modern novel and memoir have trained us to expect not only action but also the thought behind it. By eliminating almost all of these genre’s conventional 130 s recto runningfoot 131 devices—confession, storytelling, reversals of fortune, indecision, sudden action—Thoreau strips away the trappings of literature as he had the luxuries of life. Thus, with its careful elisions and narrative austerity, Walden became an exact analogue of the life Thoreau had cut...