Concord, MA, Walden Pond Replica Cabin interior, writer’s retreat
It’s not what one looks at but what one sees that matters. —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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Just as the world was getting too crazy, I stumbled on Walden Pond. Well actually, I stumbled on a new PBS documentary on the life and work of Henry David Thoreau.
It was a refuge from the news cycle. It took me back to his book Walden: Life in the Woods and to his essay “Civil Disobedience.” It showed me a noble face. A life well-lived.
Nothing like spending some time with a transcendentalist to ease one’s troubled mind. Nothing like seeing the divine in a wood thrush, a water lily, or a bean patch. Nothing like hearing poetry in an owl’s hoot or tasting paradise in a huckleberry.
The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.
Thoreau was a naturalist. He drew our attention to the astounding web of life before, above, and beneath us.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Thoreau found inner peace, but he did not forsake the world.
Thoreau was an abolitionist. He spoke out against slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. He was a conductor on the underground railroad. He stood up for John Brown.
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
Thoreau was a pacifist. He opposed imperialism. He went to jail rather than pay a tax to support America’s war with Mexico.
If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.
Yes, Thoreau is a model of civility, simplicity, and self-reliance, but his mother did his laundry. She lived just a mile from Walden Pond. Seems like everybody knew that but me.
But I don’t hold that against him. His one-room cabin had no room for a washer and dryer.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can live without.
Years before he went to Walden Pond, Thoreau worked in his father’s pencil factory. While there he found a way to improve the commonly gritty, brittle, and greasy pencil. He bonded graphite with Bavarian clay, and just like that, there was lead pencil no. 2. The most popular wooden pencil in the world.
It was something he could not do without.
Did everybody know that but me?
