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2. Getting (Not Too) Close to Nature
- University of California Press
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38 ...................................... 2 GETTING (NOT TOO) CLOSE TO NATURE We talk of communing with nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune. John Burroughs, The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, November 27, 1877 The Legacy of Thoreau When I first asked Helen Nearing what thinker had most influenced her life, she instantly replied, “Thoreau.” Subsequent conversations turned up a rotating repertory of writers and activists who were touchstones for her: Scott Nearing, of course, whose notebooks Helen frequently reread; Krishnamurti, her first great romantic and spiritual companion; Olive Schreiner, an early feminist writer whose books were often at Helen’s bedside; and, Pearl Buck, a fellow Vermont intellectual and writer who had encouraged the Nearings in their first publishing venture. But Thoreau’s work was the most consistent foundation.1 As I have already shown, homesteading conversion narratives often model themselves on Thoreau’s example and on Walden as a ideal text. Certainly, his writing serves as a template—offering a “why I did it” opening that many homesteaders imitate. Homesteaders’ testaments of their own efforts to “know by experience” often borrow Thoreau’s narrative structure (four seasons), his objects of inquiry (visitors, animals, sounds, beans), and his rhetorical strategy of moving from descriptions of “natural facts” to meditations on the “spiritual facts” to which the natural observations point.2 But the Thoreauvian influence extends well beyond that of a literary model. Walden represented the essence of “right-livelihood” for those ready and willing to follow his example. Throughout the Nearings’ texts, we find evidence of their admiration for Thoreau’s tightwad economics, his blend of personal optimism and social cyn- Getting (Not Too) Close to Nature 39 icism, and his self-styled crankiness. Indeed, the Nearings welcomed those who characterized Living the Good Life as the “twentieth-century Walden.” At the same time, however, some aspects of the Transcendentalist mind Helen and Scott chose to neglect or ignore. As with many readers, Helen never hesitated to point out that Thoreau was not truly self-sufficient at Walden, having ready access to the town and to the maternal cookie jar. Moreover, Thoreau liked to insist that a day of idleness was as worthy a pursuit as any. His portrait of a good day at Walden—“It was morning and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished”—is an intentional send-up of the intense productivity depicted in the creation story of the book of Genesis.3 Such pronouncements hardly resemble the Nearings’ insistence on a “four-four-four” formula for patterning their days (four hours of farm-based “bread-labor,” four hours of leisure time, and four hours of “association,” i.e., building community and contributing to social reform). While the Nearings publicly recommended leisure—and certainly resisted dominant cultural models of “going to work”—their homesteading vision was inscribed with a strict Protestant work ethic that outclassed any ideal types Max Weber might have imagined.4 In fact, the four-hour block originally designated for leisure is elsewhere described as a time for “professional interests,” such as violin playing and teaching (for Helen) and, together, writing, giving lectures, answering correspondence , and developing the Social Science Institute to further their reform work. Moreover, real life at the Nearing homestead, especially with the constant in- flux of visitors, was often a life in which private time had to be rigorously protected and sometimes did not exist. The Nearings’ daily patterns often involved much more attention to “productive” and “serious” work than their early descriptions of sun bathing and music making suggested to hopeful readers. Excerpts from Walden pepper the epigraphs that open the chapters of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life, but these selections reveal a particular version of Thoreau, one who seems to be nodding with approval at certain aspects of the Nearing project: performing hard physical labor, simplifying daily wants, and keeping strictly vegetarian. But this is not the Thoreau who wants to ingest a woodchuck raw, infusing its wildness directly into his very being, nor is it the Thoreau who (surprising the unsuspecting reader) trembles with the fear of wilderness on the upper reaches of Kataadin. It is also not the Thoreau who praises idleness for its own sake or is content to leave the shores of Walden once his “experiment” is concluded. The Thoreau that appears in the Nearings’ texts is Thoreau as ideal homesteader. All readers of Walden have their own Thoreau. The text and the writer exhibit an enduring...