Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

1. Adventure

recto runningfoot 9 When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life. (14) Is Walden the record of an adventure? If so, why does Thoreau avoid using that word to describe his twenty-six months in the woods? Although Walden now stands as one of the great adventures in nineteenth-century American history, Thoreau clearly preferred to cast his project in scientific terms (see “Experiment”), perhaps hoping that a more clinical vocabulary would convince his neighbors that what might have looked like irresponsible idling was, in fact, rigorous research. He may also have sensed that the pond’s proximity to Concord, and his own near-daily trips to town, would have made any claims of “adventure” seem ridiculous hyperbole: after all, to many of his townsmen, Thoreau was just camping out on Emerson’s land, like a child in his parents’ backyard. But the issue is more complex. Thoreau himself loved travel books, especially those about explorers. And yet he dismisses this taste as a guilty pleasure: “I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work,” he confesses in Walden, “till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived” (71). Thoreau will begin Walden’s “Conclusion” with an elaboration on this theme, converting it into an explicit exhortation: Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. a d v e n t u r e 1 . A 10 verso runningfoot . . . [B]e a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. . . . Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. (215–16) For Thoreau, however, his own command proved difficult to obey, and the problem almost certainly involved his vexed attitude toward writing . For a start, how he could portray his Walden sojourn as “an adventure ” when his neighbors must have quickly realized that he spent most of time there not exploring or hunting but writing? Thoreau himself seemed ambivalent about this activity, admitting in the Week, composed at Walden, that “it is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what interests us” (Week, 332). Thoreau’s career—and, indeed, his life—would turn on his ability to overcome this opposition. Walden amounts to the first demonstration , to himself as well as his readers, that writing does not foreclose the possibility of adventure but rather enables it. In effect, Thoreau anticipated the lesson of Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin (in Nausea): For the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. . . . Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. . . . That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life. It’s tempting to think that such telling amounts to casting a spell, an enchantment that will endow the world around us, and our very selves, with a newfound splendor. In Thoreau’s hands, however, writing prompted a kind of attention that requires becoming clear eyed. Only by looking at the world with a vision stripped of habit and custom can we begin to take on the role that Nietzsche would announce “as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world which is called ‘human being’, as surveyors.” In the years following his stay at Walden, Thoreau, of course, would make his primary living as a surveyor, but he also continued to write in his journal almost every day. He would teach himself that writing made even the most ordinary day, with all of its eventlessness and unexceptional weather, an adventure. 10 a ...