Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

25. Opportunity

100 verso runningfoot 2 5 . O p p o r t u n i t y Mem. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. (153) Walden tells the story of a triumph: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment,” Thoreau declares in his “Conclusion,” “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” (217). For Thoreau, this success was the discovery that he would henceforth be able to avoid regular work; even more important, he had fashioned a way of living and writing that, by tuning his disposition to the natural world, would provide him with satisfaction and even joy. He had reason to brag like chanticleer about what he had found in the woods. And yet there had always been other possible versions of this story. The deaths of his brother and sister, the Week’s absolute commercial failure, the seven-year struggle to complete Walden, his neighbors’ persistent doubts, his own intermittent melancholy—all these things Thoreau suppressed. “If the reader think that I am vainglorious, and set myself above others,” he confided in a passage cut from Walden, “I assure him that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself, . . . could encourage him with a sufficient list of failures. . . . Finally, I will tell him this secret, if he will not abuse my confidence—I put the best face on the matter.” This passage, one of the most revealing Thoreau ever wrote, confirms that despite its opening warranty of truthfulness , Walden was constructed like a fiction. recto runningfoot 101 Walden is shadowed by other American stories of men who break with all they know and find themselves adrift. Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, a town disgrace beloved by children and with “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour,” chooses to “stroll away into the woods” to avoid farmwork and his wife’s nagging . Spellbound by a magic potion, he sleeps away twenty years, awakening to discover that he has lost his youth and his identity: like It’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey, he is reduced to pleading: “Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle!” Hawthorne’s Wakefield leaves home on a business trip, only to take up residence for twenty years (that number again) in an adjacent block, from which he can observe his house and grieving wife. Having had no real reason for this mysterious flight, he needs none to return, but his wife has ceased loving him, and he has become an old man. Melville’s Bartleby, a New York clerk, makes an internal retreat by simply refusing everything with the phrase “I would prefer not to.” He starves himself to death. These are cautionary tales. As Hawthorne advises, “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.” Thoreau, however, was not “nicely adjusted” to the system of Concord, and he seemed willing to accept the risk of becoming an outcast. “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection” (60), he announces, having taken pains to avoid the pitfalls. As if alluding to Rip Van Winkle’s perilous twenty -year sleep, Walden celebrates alertness, insisting that “we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake” (64). Thoreau replaces the capriciousness of Wakefield’s adventure with his own sustained purposefulness. And if Bartleby can only say “no,” Walden records Thoreau’s efforts to live according to his own precept, announced in his first published essay: “Surely joy is the condition of life.” Thus, among these narratives, Walden stands out as the success story, the one that turns out well. Its ability to do so depends on Thoreau’s single most decisive move: his conversion of what had begun as pure escape (“Finding that my fellow citizens were not likely to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living any where else, . . . I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods” [16]) opportunity 101 102 verso runningfoot into a deliberate experiment, designed both to prove his economic hypothesis and to help him discover a way of life. It’s as if...