Why I Returned to Walden

In many ways “Walden” saved my life. It was 1985 and I remember leaving work for lunch and driving to Harold Parker State Forest, setting up a chair on the top of a hill, in the woods, overlooking a lake, and reading “Walden.” I had read it before, maybe thirteen or some odd years before, and felt a certain kinship with it, like how many people before. But as the years passed, and I moved into an adulthood with the ignorance that Dylan once sang to (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”), I began to think Thoreau an adolescent, not adult enough, not having much common sense. And so me and Henry parted ways.

But something closely resembling a nervous breakdown can make things awfully clear. For whatever reason, I could not be that adult I thought I should be. Not that I wanted to shirk responsibilities. Actually, I relished them. Another pop song that made all the difference in my life was Van Morrison’s “St. Dominic’s Preview” and his simple observation: “No one's making no commitments / To anybody but themselves.” Well, I was determined not to be like that.

But there’s only so much of yourself that you can sublimate. And so I went to Thoreau because I wanted to live deliberately again. And in so doing I discovered not an adolescent, but a visionary. And my life has never been the same. Not that I’m living some revolutionary existence, but I am living my life, and not some grand American middle class ideal of one. And I thank Henry for that. And maybe that’s why I blog Henry every day. Payback. I owe him. My great-grandfather was a clairvoyant. I have the pictures to prove it. So maybe this is the 21st century way of channeling. No maybe. I believe it is.

And in reading his Journals daily, and I scan each entry for that day through the years, I’ve discovered something important about Henry. Yes, there are great visionary passages that will stop time itself. But there are also passages that reveal Henry the human. And tonight I read such a one. Concerning why he left Walden Pond. Say what you will about the man, but he definitely was not an adolescent. He was realistic. But just not to a fault.

“But why I changed? why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I ever came to go there. Perhaps it is none of my business, even if it is yours. Perhaps I wanted a change. There was a little stagnation, it may be. About 2 o’clock in the afternoon the world’s axle creaked as if it needed greasing, as if the oxen labored with the wain and could hardly get their load over the ridge of the day. Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms.”

Amen Henry. After all, he was “just a human, a victim of the insane. Isolation.”