The little green book

The little green book

Walden Pond • Photo by Pablo Sanchez Martin (CC BY 2.0)

Originally published 1 October 2006

In 1992, Shamb­ha­la Pub­li­ca­tions issued an abridged edi­tion of Thore­au’s Walden in their Pock­et Clas­sics series. This sweet lit­tle book was about the size of a deck of play­ing cards, and pro­ceeds from sales went to the Walden Woods Project, a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion work­ing to pre­serve the his­toric and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sen­si­tive land around Walden Pond. Michael McCur­dy’s wood engrav­ing of “Thore­au at the Cab­in” graced the cover.

It made an ide­al gift for stu­dents in my Nat­u­ral­ist class (we walked, we stud­ied, we read, we wrote — and wrote — and wrote). It fit hand­i­ly in a pock­et, and was, I thought, a sort of woodsy equiv­a­lent of Mao’s “Lit­tle Red Book.” On a bright Octo­ber day each year we made our way to Walden Pond, and sit­ting at the site of Thore­au’s cab­in we read aloud select­ed pas­sages from the book. My Shamb­ha­la Walden is still flagged with pas­sages to read, a nos­tal­gic reminder of those unsur­pass­able times.

I went to the woods because I wished to live delib­er­ate­ly, to front only the essen­tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, dis­cov­er that I had not lived…I want­ed to live deep and suck out all the mar­row of life.

In wild­ness is the preser­va­tion of the world,” wrote Thore­au, and we embla­zon his words on T‑shirts and posters, and imag­ine him deep in a primeval for­est, his soli­tude dis­turbed only by the cry of a loon or hoot of an owl.

Well, not quite. Dur­ing Thore­au’s life­time, the mid-1800s, south­ern New Eng­land was more intense­ly cul­ti­vat­ed than at any time before or since. Two-thirds of the land was open fields and pas­ture, inter­spersed with small wood­lots and criss­crossed by roads. From his favorite van­tage points on Conan­tum Cliff or Fair Haven Hill, Thore­au looked out on a tidy patch­work of agri­cul­tur­al plots — cul­ti­vat­ed fields, orchards, wood­lots and water mead­ows — that stretched as far as the eye could see, and loved what he saw. His land­scape was not all that dif­fer­ent from the woods and mead­ows I explored with my students.

We sell our­selves short when we posit an irrec­on­cil­able oppo­si­tion between our­selves and wild nature. Human intel­li­gence is, like it or not, the crown­ing achieve­ment of nat­ur­al selec­tion, and prop­er­ly applied it can sweet­en nature’s raw grandeur with the added grace of art. On return­ing from the Maine woods, Thore­au wrote: “It was a relief to get back to our smooth, but still var­ied land­scape. For a per­ma­nent res­i­dence, it seemed to me that there could be no com­par­i­son between this [Con­cord] and the wilder­ness. The wilder­ness is sim­ple, almost to bar­ren­ness. The par­tial­ly cul­ti­vat­ed coun­try it is which chiefly has inspired, and will con­tin­ue to inspire, the strains of poets.”

As I sit at my win­dow this sum­mer after­noon, hawks are cir­cling about my clear­ing; the tan­tivy of wild pigeons, fly­ing by twos and threes athwart my view, or perch­ing rest­less on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dim­ples the glassy sur­face of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bend­ing under the weight of the reed birds flit­ting hith­er and thith­er; and for the last half hour I have heard the rat­tle of rail­road cars, now dying away and then reviv­ing like the beat of a par­tridge, con­vey­ing trav­el­ers from Boston to the country.

Many peo­ple take Thore­au at his word when he says he dines hap­pi­ly on wood­chuck, or that he would rather sit on a pump­kin than a vel­vet cush­ion. We sat on sandy earth where Thore­au sat, and the rail­road is still but a few hun­dred paces away. When we closed our eyes, the tan­tivy of birds and reeds and wind-bowed white-pine boughs was still to be heard — once we had learned to lis­ten. It was worth trav­el­ing to Walden to learn from the mas­ter, but what we learned is that Walden is every­where — any­where — if we make it so.

It is time to stop din­ing on philo­soph­i­cal wood­chuck and rec­og­nize that it is our own wild nature, rapa­cious and self­ish like that of all oth­er crea­tures, that threat­ens bio­di­ver­si­ty and poi­sons the envi­ron­ment. If we have hope for a gra­cious future, it will be civ­i­liza­tion, not wild­ness, that saves us.

I left the woods for as good a rea­son as I went there. Per­haps it seemed to me that I had sev­er­al more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remark­able how eas­i­ly we fall into a par­tic­u­lar route, and make a beat­en track for ourselves…The sur­face of the earth is soft and impress­ible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

If we learned some­thing sit­ting togeth­er in Walden Woods, it was to suck the mar­row out of our wee green Shamb­ha­la and move on. Cas­tles in the air are fine, says Thore­au, but only if we put firm foun­da­tions under them. And the foun­da­tions will inevitably be cre­ations of the human imag­i­na­tion because it is imag­i­na­tion above all else that makes us human.

Thore­au schol­ar David Fos­ter writes: “Despite the cleared forests, the dwin­dling ani­mal pop­u­la­tions, the dammed and pol­lut­ed rivers, and the declin­ing num­bers of water­fowl and fish, Thore­au was able to find wild­ness in a thou­sand scenes, each one shaped by human activity…And, of course, he could turn Walden, a cut-over and ‘tamed’ wood­lot, whose shores had recent­ly been des­e­crat­ed by one thou­sand work­ers build­ing the rail­road to Fitch­burg, into a sym­bol of soli­tude, nat­ur­al val­ues, and wilderness.”

This appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion leaves us with two ideas to pon­der, says Fos­ter. The first is that wilder­ness can be found with­in one­self. The sec­ond is that we inevitably live in a cul­tur­al­ly con­di­tioned land­scape that can be appre­ci­at­ed for both its nat­ur­al qual­i­ties and the human sto­ry it contains.

What we can learn from Thore­au is not a nos­tal­gic long­ing for the for­est primeval, but how to love the “tamed” land­scape we have inher­it­ed, how to cul­ti­vate its civ­i­liz­ing qual­i­ties, and how to live with­in it in ways that are spir­i­tu­al­ly and moral­ly awake.

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