The Socrates Express

Some are born Thoreau, others achieve Thoreau. Most have Thoreau thrust upon them.

Henry David Thoreau was thrust upon me in ninth grade. I couldn’t follow him, nor would I if I could. As I said, I am no woodsman. My life is not a model of simplicity. And while I do have reclusive tendencies, I prefer to do my recluding in a hotel room, not a tiny cabin without plumbing or decent Wi-Fi. I promptly exiled Walden to the Siberia of my brain, where it joined Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and integral calculus.

A few weeks before my journey to Concord, I stumbled upon a New Yorker article about Thoreau. It was called “Pond Scum” and, as you can imagine, did little to rehabilitate the Hermit of Concord in my mind. The story’s author, Kathryn Schulz, opens the piece by painting a picture of a coldhearted, misanthropic crank. Then she takes the gloves off.

But as the commuter train pulls into Concord Station, just as it did during Thoreau’s day, I resolve to maintain an open mind. If I’ve learned anything from my philosophical investigations, it’s that first impressions are often wrong. Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another. Slowly, making all local stops.

I’ve arrived in Concord with a plan. This chapter will be called “How to Live Alone like Thoreau” or “How to Live Simply like Thoreau” or, given the hypocrisies revealed in “Pond Scum,” perhaps “How to Pretend to Live Simply and Alone While Sneaking Off to Your Mom’s for Homemade Cookies like Thoreau.” His experiment in isolation wasn’t so isolated after all.

I take one step inside the Concord Free Public Library and see it’s not a typical small-town library. How could it be? Concord is not a typical small town. “The biggest little place in America,” as the novelist Henry James called it, played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War—the shot heard round the world was heard here first—and, later, the Transcendentalist movement that birthed, among others, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau was born in Concord and, except for his time at Harvard and a brief (and unhappy) stint in New York, lived his entire life here. Thoreau loved Concord. Friends tried to convince him to see Paris, but he demurred. Even when he did travel, to Maine and Canada, he took Concord with him. “I carry Concord ground in my boots and in my hat—and am I not made of Concord dust?”

The Concord library, like all good ones, provides plenty of reading nooks. I step into one called the Transcendentalist Cove. The movement’s giants, frozen in marble, look down on me. There’s Emerson and Alcott and, of course, Thoreau. The bust is later Thoreau, bearded and owlish. It’s a kind face. Or is that a mask, concealing a dark, pond-scummy interior?

Thoreau’s favorite books, on display here, offer a few clues. Like Marcus, Thoreau was a wisdom scavenger. “I do not the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them,” he wrote. Thoreau read the ancient Greeks and Romans, but also sampled more exotic fare: The Analects of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita. Forager extraordinaire, he was among the first Western philosophers to mine Indian and Chinese sources. Good philosophy, like a good lightbulb, brightens the room. Where the bulb was manufactured, how much it cost, its wattage, its age, the science behind it—none of this matters as long as it illuminates the room. Illuminates your room.

Thoreau turned east for the usual reason: personal crisis. The year was 1837. He had just been fired from his teaching position at a Concord school for refusing to administer corporal punishment, as was the practice of the day. He was broke and directionless. Then he stumbled across a book, one thousand pages long and with a title to match: A Historical and Descriptive Account of British India. Thoreau slogged through it, and unearthed gems. These ideas, at once alien and familiar, wormed their way into his mind. “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi,” he wrote to a friend.

Thoreau, I think, was less yogi and more sannyasi. In Hindu tradition, a sannyasi is someone who, having discharged his familial obligations, relinquishes all material goods and retreats to the forest to pursue a purely spiritual life.

I turn a corner, and nearly collide with Leslie Wilson, curator of special collections. She is tall and trim, with alert, searching eyes. I like her. I like how she has lived with Thoreau for decades, yet not tired of him. I like how her admiration for the man hasn’t slipped into sycophancy.

Leslie tells me she regularly fields inquiries from the many “pilgrims, groupies, and crackpots” who swarm to Walden Pond every day, the irony of crowding into a temple of solitude apparently lost on them.

There’s nothing special about Walden, she tells me. “It’s a mosquitoridden swamp-hole.” She elongates “swamp-hole,” letting the words loiter on her tongue, savoring the delicious blasphemy. “There’s nothing magical about this place.”

To believe otherwise is to miss Thoreau’s point. Places are special to the extent we make them so. Don’t come to Walden, Thoreau would chide his twenty-first-century groupies. Find your own Walden. Better yet, make your own Walden.