Thoreau's Natural Community and Utopian Socialism

They have bought a farm, in order to make agriculture the basis of their life, it being the most direct and simple in relation to nature.

A true life, although it aims beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthy earth. The perfume of clover lingers about it—Elizabeth P. Peabody, "Plan of the West Roxbury Community"

When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans. . . .

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

In the pantheon of American literary icons, Thoreau is our sternest disobedient. He stood alone on his conscience against a nation of temporizers, coming out from a society that could kidnap escaped slaves and steal land from a fellow republic. More, he took such commitment to its extreme, preferring the isolation of virtuous self-reliance to participation in a compromising social contract. Yet in Walden, his narrative of withdrawal, he insistently characterizes his time alone in the woods by means of metaphors of town life: "I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object. . . ." ¹ In a journal entry on Thoreau's excursion essay, "A Winter Walk," Emerson reacted crossly to this paradoxical way of inscribing a community on an empty woodlot: "H. D. T. sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. . . . He praises wild mountains & winter forests for their domestic air; villagers & wood choppers for their urbanity; and the wilderness for resembling Rome & Paris." ² Of course this is exactly Thoreau's point. What Emerson does not see is that, like Walden, "A Winter Walk" is about having feelings of sociability, community, and even intimacy with wild nature itself—so much so that Thoreau's definiteness on the subject verges on redundancy:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. (W, 131–32)

Gentle, sweet, beneficent, friendly, kindred, nearest of blood, humanest—in this crescendo of sympathy, Thoreau weaves himself into a tightly knit community where nature occupies the far end of every social bond. Crucially, he does not seek to include the woods in the web of human relationships. The sharp negative remains firmly in place: such feelings of community are to be sought not in the company of other people but alone. This apparent contradiction at the heart of Walden registers the vitality of Thoreau's engagement with one of the leading manifestations of radical political sentiment during the 1840s, the utopian socialist Association movement.

Sterling Delano recently discovered and published documentary evidence that...