Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American essayist, poet, and naturalist, the youngest figure of the Transcendentalist circle that formed around Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts. He trained at Harvard, made pencils in the family workshop, surveyed land for a living, and published almost nothing that sold. He is remembered for two works above all: Walden (1854), the record of two years living in a cabin he built beside a Concord pond, and the essay later titled “Civil Disobedience” (1849), which argued that a just person owes no obedience to an unjust law. Between them, and beneath them both, ran a journal of some two million words, kept almost daily for a quarter-century — the workshop in which the rest was made.

Henry David Thoreau in an 1856 daguerreotype made by Benjamin D. Maxham of Worcester, Massachusetts — Benjamin D. Maxham, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Transcendentalist channel

Transcendentalism, the loose New England movement to which he belonged, held that truth is reached not through doctrine or inherited authority but through direct intuition — that the individual mind, attending closely, touches the same source the scriptures touch. The conviction had several tributaries. From Immanuel Kant and his successors came the very word transcendental and the claim that the mind brings something prior to experience; the German systems reached New England less by direct reading than through English mediators, above all Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose distinction between a higher Reason and a lower Understanding gave the Americans a vocabulary for intuition over calculation. The architecture of those systems belongs to Schelling and Hegel; the Concord writers took the temper rather than the apparatus. A second tributary was older: the Neoplatonism carried into English by the translator Thomas Taylor, through whom Plato and Plotinus entered the movement’s reading as a living mysticism of the soul’s ascent toward the One rather than as classroom philosophy. A third, the newest, was the flood of Asian scripture then arriving in translation — the Bhagavad Gita in Charles Wilkins’s 1785 English version, the Laws of Manu, the Vishnu Purana, fragments of Buddhist text — which the Transcendentalists read alongside the Bible as variant testimony to one inner light.

Emerson supplied the movement its doctrine and its prose; that thought, and the movement as a movement, belong to Emerson’s own entry. Thoreau’s distinction within the circle was to take the doctrine literally — to treat self-reliance not as a lecture-hall ideal but as a thing to be done with one’s own hands, on a particular patch of ground, and recorded.

Walden

On July 4, 1845 — Independence Day chosen, it seems, deliberately — Thoreau moved into a one-room cabin, roughly ten feet by fifteen, that he had built on a woodlot Emerson owned beside Walden Pond. He stayed two years, two months, and two days, leaving in September 1847; the book that grew from those years took another seven to finish and appeared in 1854. Walden is not a wilderness chronicle — the village lay a mile and a half off, and he walked in often — but an experiment in subtraction. Stripping life to its essentials, he wanted to see what was left, and whether what was left was worth having. The famous statement of the project, in the chapter on what he lived for, is that he went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life, and not, when he came to die, to discover that he had not lived at all.

Thoreau’s Cove at Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts, photographed about 1908 — Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The book is built as an argument before it is a chronicle. Its long opening chapter, “Economy,” is a ledger — the literal cost of the cabin down to the nail, set against the unaccounted cost of the lives his neighbors were leading, men he saw as spending themselves to acquire what they did not need and so going into a quiet bondage of their own making. The bulk of the wealth a man pays for, Thoreau insists, is bought with his time, which is his life; the cheaper life, honestly kept, buys the time back. The two years are then compressed into the single turning of one year, autumn to autumn, so that the narrative runs the round of the seasons once and ends not with departure but with the spring thaw and a parable of renewal. It is a Transcendentalist book in form as well as doctrine: the close attention to a bean-field or a loon is never only natural history but a discipline meant to wake what he called the morning faculty, the power to see one’s own life as if for the first time.

Into this practice of attention he folded his Eastern reading. In the morning, he wrote, he would bathe his intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, beside which the modern world’s literature seemed to him puny and trivial. The detachment the Gita teaches — action performed without grasping after its fruit — he set against the plainness of his own days, and the discipline of Manu against the soft compulsions of the village. This reading is nineteenth-century literary reception, not the practice of a living tradition: Thoreau approached the Gita and the texts of Hinduism and Buddhism through Orientalist translations, with no teacher and no lineage, and bent them toward a New England purpose. He did not become a Hindu or a Buddhist; he found in their detachment a confirmation of something he already meant to do, and the encounter is one of the channels by which Asian religious thought entered nineteenth-century American letters.

That the world’s scriptures and the pond’s own surface could be read as one text — that nature itself was legible, a second revelation set beside the books — is the pantheist edge of his mysticism, and the point at which it most resembles the Neoplatonic conviction that the visible world bodies forth an invisible order. It is also the reading most properly called the movement’s own. To take every tradition as variant testimony to a single inner light is itself an interpretation — kin to the later perennialist claim of one truth behind the faiths — and it belongs to the Transcendentalist way of reading rather than to the history of what those scriptures, in their own homes, were ever taken to mean.

The journal and the legible world

The journal Thoreau began on October 22, 1837, at Emerson’s prompting, and kept until 1861, ran past two million words — roughly seven thousand printed pages. It was the quarry from which Walden and the essays were cut, but it became, over its later years, something the books are not: a sustained, dated record of the Concord woods and waters across the turning seasons. He measured the depth of the pond, charted when each plant flowered and each bird returned, tracked the freezing and thaw, and watched his own moods rise and fall with the year. This phenological patience — observation pursued for its own sake, day after day, with the observer held in the same frame as the observed — is why later readers claim the journal as a founding document of American environmental thought. The literary scholar Lawrence Buell, in The Environmental Imagination (1995), made Thoreau the central case for an ecocentric turn in American writing, the figure who learned to put the nonhuman world, rather than the perceiving self, at the center of the page. The naturalist’s attention and the mystic’s are, in the journal, hard to tell apart: to see the thing exactly was, for Thoreau, already a way of seeing through it.

The painted pine desk (Concord, 1838) Thoreau used at Walden Pond, now in the Concord Museum — photograph by Daderot, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

In his last years the journal turned increasingly empirical. He read Darwin’s Journal of Researches and, after 1859, On the Origin of Species, and the late manuscripts — the seed-dispersal studies gathered long afterward as The Dispersion of Seeds, the records of forest succession — read as working natural science rather than reverie. Modern scientists have used his decades of dated flowering records as a baseline against which to measure the warming of New England’s climate, a use Thoreau could not have foreseen but for which his method was exactly suited. The continuity is the point: the same patient looking that opened, in Walden, onto the soul’s renewal could narrow, in the journal, to the germination of a pine — and Thoreau saw no break between the two. To attend to the particular was, for him, the whole of the spiritual discipline, and the woods the text on which it was practiced.

Civil Disobedience

The shorter and more consequential work began in a single night in jail. In July 1846, during his second summer at the pond, Thoreau was stopped in the village by Sam Staples, Concord’s tax-collector and jailer, and asked to pay several years of an unpaid poll tax. He refused: he would not give money to a government that upheld slavery and was then waging war on Mexico to extend it — Texas had entered the Union as a slave state. He was locked up overnight and released the next morning, the tax paid against his will by someone else, probably a relative. The incident was small; the argument he drew from it was not. Delivered first as a lecture and printed in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government” in Elizabeth Peabody’s single-issue journal Aesthetic Papers, it holds that conscience stands above the law, that a citizen who recognizes a law as unjust is obliged not merely to wait for reform but to withdraw cooperation from the wrong, and that one person so withdrawing is already a majority of one. The government that governs least, it opens, governs best — and the man who serves the state with his conscience necessarily resists it. The piece took its now-standard title, “Civil Disobedience,” only posthumously, in the 1866 collection A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers.

It was little noticed in his lifetime. Its reach came by a route the author never saw. Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist who had turned to a gospel of nonresistance, read Thoreau and carried the argument into European debate; the English reformer Henry Salt, who wrote the first full biography of Thoreau in 1890, helped carry it further still. Through that channel it reached Mahatma Gandhi, who read “Civil Disobedience” in 1907 while organizing Indian resistance in South Africa and reprinted and discussed it in his journal Indian Opinion. Gandhi had already coined the term satyagraha the year before and was already in the field; what Thoreau gave him, by his own account, was confirmation — a teacher who supplied the principled backing for a practice he had begun on his own, and a usable English name for it.

Mohandas K. Gandhi, photographed in a London studio in 1931; he read and reprinted Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” while organizing resistance in South Africa — unknown photographer, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From Gandhi the line ran on to the American civil-rights movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. — distinct from the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther, and without an entry here — read the essay as a student and took from it the conviction that non-cooperation with evil is as binding a duty as cooperation with good. A short occasional essay by a man who sold few books became one of the modern world’s load-bearing statements of nonviolent resistance.

Editions, texts, and scholarship

The textual estate is unusually full, because Thoreau saved everything. The ongoing scholarly edition, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton University Press, from 1971), reconstructs the works and the journal from the manuscripts; the journal alone, in its complete form, is a multi-decade publishing project still in progress, and the Wilkins Gita that Thoreau read at the pond — a later, more accessible translation of the same work is held in the library here. Two modern intellectual biographies anchor the reading: Robert D. Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) traces the books he absorbed — Greek and Roman, Hindu, German-Romantic — into the shape of his thinking, and David M. Robinson’s Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (2004) argues that Thoreau’s nature-study and his ethics were one project, a practice of attention turned outward into the world. For the environmental reading, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995) is the standard reference, recovering Thoreau as the founding figure of an ecocentric American literature. For the political afterlife, George Hendrick’s study of the Thoreau-Gandhi transmission (New England Quarterly, 1956) traces the documentary route by which the essay reached South Africa, and the Walden Woods Project maintains a scholarly library on the essay and its sources. The wider claim that the Transcendentalists founded a continuous American “metaphysical” or “liberal religious” lineage — the seekership that would later receive figures like Vivekananda as confirmation rather than novelty — is developed by Leigh Eric Schmidt (Restless Souls, 2005) and Catherine Albanese (A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 2007).

A reputation made afterward

Thoreau is not an esoteric figure in the strict sense — he founded no order, claimed no secret knowledge, transmitted no initiation. What places him near these materials is the Transcendentalist habit, shared with Emerson and carried into the next century by literary seekers such as Hermann Hesse, of reading the world’s scriptures and the natural world alike as testimony to one inner light. The philosopher William James, a generation later, would give that intuitive, experience-first temper its American philosophical form. In his own time Thoreau printed two books — A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), self-published in a thousand copies of which only about a fifth sold, the rest returned to him in sheets, and Walden — together with a scatter of essays and lectures; the rest, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, the vast journal, came out after him, edited by his sister Sophia and his friends. He died of tuberculosis at Concord in May 1862, not yet forty-five. He published little, was read less in his own time, and died nearly unknown beyond his town. The reputation came afterward.

→ In the library: The Bhagavad Gita (Arnold, 1885) — the work, in a later translation, that Thoreau read at Walden

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermann Hesse · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Mahatma Gandhi · Bhagavad Gita · Hinduism · Buddhism · Plato · Plotinus · Mysticism · Pantheism · F W J Schelling · G W F Hegel · Thomas Taylor · Immanuel Kant · Traditionalism Perennialism · William James