On the Birthday of Henry David Thoreau

Reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond & statue of him

It's July 12 and this is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau. He was actually born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. The family pronounced their name "thorough" but everyone today seems to say "the-row." 

He spent a lot of time out in nature as a child and his mother encouraged him to learn as much as he could from nature. He went to Harvard but it wasn't an experience he enjoyed. He didn't leave with a diploma because that cost an additional five dollars. 

His father had a pencil factory and he worked there for some time. He also tried working as a public school teacher, but he was opposed to corporal punishment.

He became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and in 1841 he was invited to live with them and work as a handyman, gardener and do some childcare. His time with the children was less of a tutor and more about nature walks and stories. He stayed with them for 2 years and met many of the Transcendentalists in Emerson's circle. It was a community of writers and thinkers that included the Alcotts and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

A well-known abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau not only wrote on the terrors of slavery but also opened his home in Concord as a safe haven spot on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves making their way to Canada.

In 1844 Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond and he allowed Henry to build a small cabin in the woods beside this pristine, 61-acre pond. I have visited there and read Walden and much of Thoreau's writing. 

The myth of Thoreau and Walden that seems to have appeared in the latter part of the 20th century is that he was a kind of hermit isolated in the woods. The cabin was less than two miles from the village of Concord and he regularly had dinners with friends, still worked sometimes for the Emersons, visited his mother for tea and cookies, and had frequent visitors.

One of his famous essays is "Civil Disobedience" which he wrote after being jailed for one night due to failure to pay a poll tax. He was not an anarchist but he wrote about a non-violent approach to the opposition of traditional law and order. He felt that many Americans blindly follow these laws and behaviors throughout their lives.

He didn't go to the woods to write a book about the experience. The book he was intent on working on there became A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That was about a trip he had taken with his brother. 

Henry lost his brother John to lockjaw in 1842. John had been sharpening a razor when he cut his finger. Tetanus quickly set in and he died a painful death from it in his brother's arms days later.

Henry did finish the book and published it himself, but it sold fewer than 300 copies.

The book is about an 1839 boat trip Thoreau took with his brother to and from Concord, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire. It is his first book and being that he was writing it at Walden Pond we can see many of the things that motivated him to go to the woods and that will appear later in the Walden book. He writes about poetry, literature, philosophy, Native American and Puritan histories of New England, friendship, sacred Eastern writings, and Christianity.

He also kept a Walden Pond journal and after he left in 1846 he worked it into the manuscript that we know as Walden, or a Life in the Woods. It was not published until 1854 and made his reputation and has become a classic of nature writing and memoir.

In the book he states his intention in the experiment at Walden this way: "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." 

Today The Thoreau Society is probably gathering at Walden Pond in celebration of his life and work. The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 and is the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author. 

I have visited Walden and the other authors' homes in Concord and tried to imagine the community that was there in Thoreau's time. In the third chapter of Walden, "Reading," Thoreau describes how he derives enlightenment from reading Homer and other great writers, men who spoke of the truth when most of society is not content to strive after such truths and instead wastes their time reading popular fiction and newspapers. He believed that we should instead be dedicated to improving the intellectual culture. He believed the village of Concord could become a different kind of "university."

His experiment was not an anti-social, got-to-get-away-from-society one. Many of his readers or those who have just heard about what he did have built or found their own cabin in the woods hoping to learn or write something similar. There was much that Thoreau learned in those two years, but in the book he says, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; 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."

A Winter Walk

Henry David Thoreau advised in his journal that we should “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man’s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

I'm trying to keep my own buds safe from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

A Birthday Venn Diagram

Facebook is good about reminding me of my fiends birthdays. Some days there are five or more birthdays on the same day and I look at the group and wonder if they have any things in common. I'm not a believer in horoscopes or astrology but somehow I have this feeling that people on the same day should have some things in common. What is the overlapping part of these birthday Venn diagrams?

Today, I also saw three birthdays of famous folks.

What do these people have in common?


It’s the birthday of poet Pablo Neruda who was born in Parral, Chile in 1904. In 1923, when he was 19, he sold all his possessions in order to publish his first book, Crepusculario (Twilight). Because his father didn’t approve of his writing poetry, he published it under the pen name Pablo Neruda.

His book Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, known in English as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, is probably his most popular.

It’s also the birthday of American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, tax resister, and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817, he graduated from Harvard and then worked in his father’s pencil factory.

He also taught, resigned because he didn’t want to administer corporal punishment, and opened a school with his brother, John. John caught tetanus after cutting himself shaving and died in Thoreau’s arms and it deeply affected Henry.

A life change occurred when he went to work for Ralph Waldo Emerson and moved into Emerson’s house and tutored his children.

But of all his writing, he is best known for the decision he made on Independence Day 1845 to enter  the woods at Walden Pond, built a small cabin, and spent two years, two months, and two days there.

His experiment: in self-sufficiency did lead to a book, although it took nine years to get it into the form we know as Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854).

It motivated many - some might say too many - people to try their own version. But it did launch future movements of ecology and environmentalism.

Thoreau liked yoga and Hinduism. He contracted tuberculosis, which set his health back.

One night he sat out in the rain counting tree rings on a stump, developed bronchitis and never recovered.

“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.”

It’s also the birthday of (Gaius) Julius Caesar, born in Rome around 100 B.C.

He was the great military leader who managed to capture for the Roman Empire most of what became France and Great Britain.

Caesar wrote his own press releases, sending simple prose that was easy for ordinary people to understand about his military victories and this early social media turned him into a national hero.

As watchers of Shakespeare's play know, he became a bit too popular for the Roman Senate. They forced him to return to Rome. He defied them and crossed the Rubicon River with his army starting a civil war.

He won the war and became the absolute dictator of Rome. Surprisingly, he wanted to redistribute wealth and land. Some senators - Brutus and Cassius are the ones we remember - wanted to bring back the old republic, and they assassinated him on the steps of the Senate.

The senators' plan didn't work anyway. the Roman republic never returned and Rome was ruled by emperors for the rest of the empire’s existence.

What do these people have in common?   You tell me.