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Thoreau's Walden: Phony Testament of the Greens
Henry David Thoreau was one of the most successful literary scam artists in American history. Walden was a masterpiece of fraud.
This book has been inflicted on helpless English majors ever since the 1930's. It is anti-capitalist and pro-green. It has been the supreme literary testament of the greens.
It was fake from day one.
Henry David Thoreau was a practicing capitalist. His family owned a pencil-making business. He worked for it for most of his adult life. He was an American version of Frederick Engels, who converted Karl Marx to socialism in 1843. He bankrolled Marx for the rest of Marx's life. Engels had the money to do this. He ran the family's textile mill until he retired a wealthy man.
A year after Engels turned Marx into a Marxist, Thoreau went to live on Walden Pond. He did not own the pond or the land. Walden never says who owned it. Ralph Waldo Emerson owned it. Thoreau briefly had taught Emerson's children and also the children of Emerson's brother.
Thoreau built a shack on the land. He lived in it for 26 months. Then he left the land forever. He went home to mama's, and spent eight years writing Walden. It is an anti-capitalist, anti-commerce, pro-green tract. He hated economic growth. But he profited from it as a capitalist.
While living in "the wild," he had his mother do his laundry for him. He never married. He lived with her instead.
In other words, the book was a sham from day one. The mythology of Walden Pond is a sham. The mythologists know this, but they refuse to let loose of the myth.
The book had no influence in his lifetime. He died in 1862. It became widely read by intellectuals in the 1930's, during the Great Depression. It was part of the anti-capitalism worldview of Leftist intellectuals. They recognized a kindred spirit.
The book is a literary disaster. I have spent my adult life writing for a living. I can recognize good writing. He shows occasional flashes of brilliance, but most of the book is either irrelevant or insufferably boring. It is worse than National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
The most gripping section of the book describes a battle between red ants and black ants. There are few passages in literature that better illustrate the Darwinian phrase, "nature, red in tooth and claw." I am therefore not saying that Thoreau could not write well. I am saying that he rarely wrote well in Walden. Its reputation as a literary masterpiece is part of the anti-capitalist, pro-green mythology.
The praise that literary critics heap on the book is a public testimony to the academic con job known as literary criticism. Let me offer an example of this mostly tax-funded cottage industry. This is from the latest version of Wikipedia: article on "Walden." I wrote this for 9th grade English students. I teach a course on autobiographies for the Ron Paul Curriculum. I prepare students to write their own autobiographies. Walden is by far the best-known and most influential autobiography in the course. It is also by far the worst written.
My comments are in brackets.
Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance.
[The book has nothing to do with self-reliance. He lived two miles from his mother's house. He regularly bought supplies in Concord. He spent many of his summer evenings in Concord. With regard to his supposed understanding of his self, he brought this with him.]
First published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. The book compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.
[The book never mentions Emerson. It never says who owned the land. The book barely mentions human development. If that is what the book really is about, the author was too subtle for me.]
By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home.
[Always compare high-flying literary analysis like this with the actual book. Never assume that the person who writes something like this knows what he is talking about. Read critically. Don't take anyone's word for this. Decide for yourself.]
He wrote:
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 did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
[How did living in a shack for 26 months, from age 27 to 29, just down the road from his mother's house, enable him to achieve what this paragraph says were his goals?]
Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden opens with the announcement that Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond living a simple life without support of any kind.
[He did not have a job. His family owned a business: pencil-making. He returned to that business after 26 months, ending forever his supposed self-reliance in the woods.]
Readers are reminded that at the time of publication, Thoreau is back to living among the civilized again.
[He never left the "civilized." He went into town to socialize several nights a week.]
Walden is a difficult book to read for three reasons: First, it was written by a gifted writer who uses surgically precise language, extended, allegorical metaphors, long and complex paragraphs and sentences, and vivid, detailed, and insightful descriptions. Thoreau does not hesitate to use metaphors, allusions, understatement, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, and he can shift from a scientific to a transcendental point of view in mid-sentence.
[Translation: "It's a dense, almost unreadable book."]
Second, its logic is based on a different understanding of life, quite contrary to what most people would call common sense. Ironically, this logic is based on what most people say they believe. Thoreau, recognizing this, fills Walden with sarcasm, paradoxes, and double entendres. He likes to tease, challenge, and even fool his readers.
[Translation: "The book doesn't make sense."]
And third, quite often any words would be inadequate at expressing many of Thoreau's non-verbal insights into truth. Thoreau must use non-literal language to express these notions, and the reader must reach out to understand.
[Translation: "The book doesn't make sense."]
Walden emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in transcending the "desperate" existence that, he argues, is the lot of most people. The book is not a traditional autobiography, but combines autobiography with a social critique of contemporary Western culture's consumerist and materialist attitudes and its distance from and destruction of nature. That the book is not simply a criticism of society, but also an attempt to engage creatively with the better aspects of contemporary culture, is suggested both by Thoreau's proximity to Concord society and by his admiration for classical literature.
[He really did hate free enterprise and commercial life, but he went right back into it after 26 months in his shack. He worked for his family's company for the rest of his life.]
There are signs of ambiguity, or an attempt to see an alternative side of something common. Some of the major themes that are present within the text are:
Self-reliance: Thoreau constantly refuses to be in "need" of the companionship of others.
[He went into town several nights a week.]
Though he realizes its significance and importance, he thinks it unnecessary to always be in search for it. Self-reliance, to him, is economic and social and is a principle that in terms of financial and interpersonal relations is more valuable than anything. To Thoreau, self-reliance can be both spiritual as well as economic.
[He was never self-reliant. He borrowed money for his time in the woods. He bought supplies in town.]
Simplicity: simplicity seems to be Thoreau's model for life. It is philosophical and necessity to him. Throughout the book, Thoreau constantly seeks to simplify his lifestyle: he patches his clothes rather than buy new ones, he minimizes his consumer activity, and relies on leisure time and on himself for everything.
[After he left Walden, he worked as a manufacturer of pencils. Leonard E. Read in 1958 wrote a famous essay on "I, Pencil." It shows how complex the process of making a pencil is -- so complex, that no one knows how it is done.]
Progress: In a world where everyone and everything is eager to advance in terms of progress, Thoreau finds it stubborn and skeptical to think that any outward improvement of life can bring inner peace and contentment.
[If this is true, then progress is a liability. But you are alive because of progress in the division of labor, which sustains modern life. It also sustained life in New England in 1854. Thoreau knew this, and he hated it. He pretended for 26 months to avoid progress in the mid-1840s.]
There has been much guessing as to why Thoreau went to the pond, E.B White stated on this note, "Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives--the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight." While Leo Marx noted that Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond was an experiment based on his teacher, Emerson's "method of nature" and that it was a "report of an experiment in transcendental pastorialism". Likewise others have assumed Thoreau's intentions during his time at Walden Pond was "to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive, by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions?" He thought of it as an experiment in "home economics". Although Thoreau went to Walden to escape what he considered, "over-civilization", and in search of the "raw" and "savage delight" of the wilderness, he also spent considerable amounts of his time reading and writing.
[Translation: "Thoreau was so unclear about his motivation for spending 26 months in a shack, that nobody knows why he did it."]
Thoreau spent nearly four times as long on the "Walden" manuscript as he actually spent at the cabin. Upon leaving Walden Pond and at Emerson's request, Thoreau returned to Emerson's house and spent the majority of his time paying debts.
[So, the whole experiment cost him so much money that it took him years to pay off the debts. Is this self-reliance?]
After Walden's publication, Thoreau saw his time at Walden as nothing more than an experiment. He never took seriously "the idea that he could truly isolate himself from others".
[True.]
Without resolution, Thoreau used "his retreat to the woods as a way of framing a reflection on both what ails men and women in their contemporary condition and what might provide relief."
[The key words are "without resolution." He spent 26 months in the shack, and eight years writing the book. Result: no resolution.]
Walden enjoyed some success upon its release, but still took five years to sell 2,000 copies. Despite its slow beginnings, later critics have praised it as an American classic that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America".
[Selling 2,000 copies in five years is not "some success." It is a publishing failure. The man devoted eight years of his life to writing it.]
Today, Walden stands as one of America's most celebrated works of literature. John Updike wrote of Walden, "A century and a half after its publication, 'Walden' has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."
[A crank, yes. A hermit, no. A saint, no. A skilled dealer in fantasy, absolutely. Had he been from Georgia rather than Massachusetts, he would have called this "putting the shuck on the rubes."]
There are many over-rated books in American literature, but this one is surely in the top ten. Anyone who could write this sentence about a squirrel, and still win praise from English professors, knew how to put the shuck on the rubes.
One would approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the snow-crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were eyed on him--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance-- I never saw one walk--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect.