Henry David Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. He was also “in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed,” Kathryn Schulz writes.
Illustration by Eric Nyquist
Who was this cold-eyed man who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm? This was Henry David Thoreau, that great partisan of the pond, describing his visit to Cohasset in “Cape Cod.” That book is not particularly well known today, but if Thoreau’s chilly tone in it seems surprising, it is because, in a curious way, “Walden” is not well known, either.
Meanwhile, however, Thoreau had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fellow Concord resident fourteen years his senior. Intellectually as well as practically, Emerson’s influence on Thoreau was enormous. He introduced the younger man to transcendentalism, steered him toward writing, employed him as a jack-of-all-trades and live-in tutor to his children, and lent him the pond-side land where Thoreau went to live on July 4, 1845.
Food was bad, drink was bad, even shelter was suspect, and Thoreau advised keeping it to a minimum. “I used to see a large box by the railroad,” he wrote in “Walden,” “six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night”: drill a few airholes, he argued, and one of these would make a fine home. He chose to live in a somewhat larger box at Walden, but austerity prevailed there, too.
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