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?
That was Thoreauly enlightening. Transcendent even.
Life, for me, is continual education and Thoreau is one of my teachers. For three hours, I watched the Thoreau documentary and was transfixed. I did not know about the pencil factory. Thoreau, a wondrous and inventive spirit, had a sense of holy curiosity and the experience of striving to live a full and aware life. His words still inspire to this day: “Simplify, simplify.”
I can appreciate the opening quote that clarifies that looking and seeing are two distinct actions. As a child I enjoyed seeing monsters, horses, castles, faces and more in the clouds overhead. The question” what did you see when you looked “ often brings a range of answers. So from my kitchen on this snowy morning in upstate NY, Lake Ontario is gray and rippling out to the horizon and the gulls and ducks are all headed out in various directions for their days. Thank you for Thoreau this morning.
To free ourselves from the day by day materialistic urgings of a consumerism society, to find joy in creation as it is a sacred blessing. As I tap these keys, the crazy rich and their kind in office are working to trade in West Virginia beauty and nature for data centers to power Artificial Intelligence and our surveillance state. Thoreau was right. Earth is balanced perfectly except for the predation of greed and the machinery of wealth and death.
I just watched the Thoreau documentary. Re-inspired I was. I first encountered Thoreau when I was a lost and searching young man. (Now I’m a lost and searching old guy.) I walked the hills and fields around where I lived with a copy of “Walden” that also included his famous essay, “On Civil Disobedience”. “That government is best that governs not at all.”I was opposed to The Indochina War and just about everything else that was opposable in those days. (Much of what was opposable then still remains today.) It’s worth mentioning, that another companion on those long ago wanders was Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
So all these years later, my old companion returns to help guide me along a new way. It’s funny. Thoreau opened the door to the world for me. In so many ways he never left me nor was he replaced by others though many have joined us since. It’s nice to again greet an old friend and one of my original inspirations. We’ve traveled a long and dusty road together. I’m glad he found me and has stood by me for all these years. Life would’ve been impossible without him and his reliable companionship.,
Thank you, Randy. I so often find your Sunday messages so full of meaning that, sated, I’m left with little to say, though I make attempts anyway. I watched the documentary but did not have a chance to finish watching. I remember Thoreau losing his brother and best friend, excruciating for both of them. What innate gifts both must have nurtured in their childhoods, outdoors in the fullness of Mother Earth’s radiance and beauty, that Thoreau could continue to see and express this deep, thought-full perception of beauty the rest of his life. I daresay your readers can identify, as they “see” the depths of majesty in your words weekly. BTW, I use pencils to do my writing and note-taking. Nature and the human being can be a brilliant combination!
Thank you for this. After reading it at 7 am this morning, when I have more to do than I can list in preparation for the week-long visit of my daughter’s family, including 3 grandkids under the age of ten, I watched the PBS program on Thoreau. I came away with a sense of wonder fitting a Sunday morning, which has made my list of chores smaller and my joy at the rain in the leafy trees outside my windows so muchgreater.
Timely is your return to Thoreau this morning…a fellow traveler in this vast, interconnected & amazing web of life.
I remember looking out the window, on a rainy day not unlike today, musing about the difference between looking & seeing. I was a very young child, & my father encouraged my inquiries & musings, helping me to know that others before us have pondered these ideas for as long as people have been …
Grateful to ponder & rediscover here, together. Thank you. Aaaahhhh…
Love the memories your post stirred of teaching about the Transcendentalists and of walking around Walden Pond with a friend who lives in Concord. I did know those 2 facts, and every time I meet a college student who goes home on weekends for mom to do the laundry, I think of Thoreau. In one of the English texts for 5th graders that introduced Thoreau and Walden, what they liked best was his describing a fight between red and black ants. He did this very dramatically, and as he studied them in his wood chip yard, he even brought a few back to his cabin to study them under a glass tumbler, his kind of crude microscope. It’s in the Walden chapter, Brute Neighbors. A couple of the eleven-year-olds who knew he was a pacifist even saw how the brutes in the ant species compared to humans. I so enjoy the ideas and memories your posts stir up! Thanks.
I personally prefer #1
I’m just glad that Thoreau would not live to know of that unholy afterbirth of his otherwise brilliantly elegant invention: Standardized Testing.