Forty Times Walden

Walden (1854) is a seminal text of American literature. Even Americans who haven't read Henry David Thoreau's book know that he built a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond and lived there in solitude. They may also know that Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax and landed in jail or, more amusingly, that while living at Walden, he paid regular visits to his mother's house in Concord for a free hot meal. But most first-time readers of Walden are surprised to learn how many visitors, expected and unexpected, turned up at his cabin, or how many chapters contain facts of natural history, or how interested Thoreau was in the history of the region, including past residents who had been freed black slaves. Whether you're a first-time reader or you've read the book many times, Walden is full of surprises—of maxims you've heard but never thought much about, of anecdotes you think you've read but don't quite remember, of internal paradoxes and self-contradictions.

Robert B. Ray's Walden x 40 explores the richness of Thoreau's book—not by analyzing it holistically, but by offering forty short essays on different aspects of the book. Ray arranges the essays alphabetically from A ("Adventure," "Ants," "Awake") to Z ("Zanzibar"). He includes short meditations on words (what does it mean that Thoreau called his life at Walden an "experiment" rather than a "trip," "sojourn," or "residence"?), on dates (is it significant that Thoreau moved to Walden on Independence Day, July 4, 1845?), and on numbers (2,000: population of Concord during Thoreau's stay at the pond; 2 years, 2 months, 2 days: length of Thoreau's stay at Walden—and so on). He provides extended analyses of the key principles by which Thoreau tried to live: In "Drummer," "If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer," or in "Awake," "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn." And Ray has some genuinely quirky entries—"Idleness," "Kittybenders," "Stripped"—that get at the paradoxes of Thoreau's life and philosophy, including the tension between a desire "to live deliberately" and confront "the essential facts of life" versus a tendency to while away time, sitting in his sunny doorway "from sunrise to noon, rapt in a revery." (Thoreau puts this tension succinctly in the chapter "Brute Neighbors": "Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?")

In his introduction, Ray suggests that we take Thoreau at his word and try an experimental method of reading Walden "that relies on fragments left as fragments." Accordingly, Ray builds his essays on short excerpts and encourages us to dip into his own book as if it were "an assemblage of discontinuous, individual shots." Yet if you read Walden x 40 sequentially (or just regularly over the course of a few days), you'll find recurring themes in Ray's conception of Thoreau and his book. You'll read about Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophical influence and Thoreau's need to break from it. You'll read about a transcendental method that seeks for higher meaning in earthly phenomena versus a scientific desire to record pure description for its own sake. Ultimately, you'll get a sense that Ray views Walden as a book with a split personality, a work divided between its initial chapters, "Economy" and "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," which read like a sermon or an instruction manual, and its later chapters of disconnected facts, which reveal Thoreau's difficulty in shaping his journal entries into a coherent book.

A recurring question about Walden's form—is Walden a coherent work, or does Thoreau's method (he used the phrase "worked up" to describe how he turned journal material into publishable form) prevent its literary success?—leads Ray to discuss Thoreau's success as a writer. Readers, critics...