In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
On this day in 1854 those words appeared in print. They are from the second paragraph. If you do not immediately recognize them, perhaps you will recognize the beginning words;
WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
What I write today is a tribute to Henry David Thoreau, and to that book, Walden .
It was 55 years ago almost to the day that I first encountered Walden. It was late August in 1956. I had just returned from my 2nd year at National Music Camp (as it was then known) in Interlochen Michigan. I was shelf reading - browsing the books in the bookcase on the wall between the door to my parents' bedroom and the bathroom my sister and I shared in the corner near her bedroom. Over the years I would discover many wonderful books there. On this day I found a book with a leather cover in faded green - how appropriate. This particular volume had been published just before World War I as I recall, and had been a purchase by mother's father, a man who treasured books of all kinds, although his wife had gotten upset when my mother slit pages tor read the books because it decreased their values. Grampa George thought it was fine, after all, books were meant to be read.
My mother had taken the book as her own when she went off to Cornell at age 15 as a sophomore. Somehow it had stayed with her as she wound up in Washington in the Office of Price Administration in early 1942, where she encountered a man whom she had met in dramatics at college, and married him. It came back North when after the War they returned to New York City, first on Riverside Drive, then briefly in the summer of 1948 in her parents summer home in Long Beach, an hour by train from Penn Station, then finally that fall to the house in Larchmont New York where I grew up, and where in 1956 I discovered it. By then, it may well have been almost 2 decades since it last had been opened.
I read that opening paragraph, sat on the floor, and started leafing through it.
When I grew up at 1 Huguenot Drive, the entire neighborhood had not yet been developed. The house in which we lived had been built around the end of the first World War. It would be another 2 years until we substantially remodeled it. At this point there was a section of woods across the street, with one small house in its midst, with a reclusive man whom I never saw. We bought the lot next door so that it would not be developed, and in two different directions there were small patches of woods on the border with New Rochelle that also served as an exploratorium for a small ball.
By this time I had come to appreciate some parts of the natural world. After all, Interlochen was in a heavily wooded area, with the camp adjacent to a state park, although the portions near us were regularly full of people camping - with tents, or in trailers - this is well before the day of RVs. Still, from one side of the camp to another we walked along the edge of the park and there were lots of wood. At one end of the boys camp was the residence of Walter Hasting, a famous naturalist who had all his collections in a small museum. From him we learned names of creatures and plants, and an appreciation for the natural world.
And from Thoreau I began to learn something else - the power of reflection, on all subjects. For example, consider this:
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet — if a hero ever has a valet — bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes — his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
Do not worry. I do not propose here to make many extended quotations from the book. It is, rather, best savored at a quiet time, without the extended noises of modern civilization, such as the sound of the vehicles passing down the busy street in front of our house, or the sound of the central air conditioner and furnace blower clicking on, or the faint rumble overhead of planes approaching or leaving National Airport.
As I write the foregoing paragraph my mind jumps backward to 1974. Then I was staying at St. Gregory's Abbey, an Episcopalian Benedictine Monastery in Three Rivers, Michigan, not to far from Kalamazoo. I was exploring my future, by creating time away from my normal patterns of life. Monasticism was, surprisingly, among my options then, as it would be later even after I had begun my relationship with Leaves on the Current, when I would spend an extended period of time in a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece. The occasion from 1974 was when I left the monastery for several days to go on retreat in a cabin on the edge of a small lake. The monastery itself was on a rural road, but this was away from the road, without running water or electricity. I brought a jug of water, a couple of books, a notebook, and perhaps a couple of candy bars, although in the two days I was there I do not remember eating. It was a time to slow down, which meant I read little, to become open to my surroundings, which very much were of the natural world, and to pay attention.
That last is key. To pay attention. Too often both before and since I have found myself doing things on automatic pilot, without thinking. If I catch myself, it is with a start, because if there is one thing I have known now for almost 55 years it is the importance of attention - to the natural world around us, to the persons we encounter, to what we are doing, to our own thoughts and emotions.
To keep this from being too long, allow me to quote just a few more paragraphs, these from the conclusion. I will, shortly, allow Thoreau to simply speak for himself.
This is not his most profound work, which may be that on civil disobedience, written in the previous decade.
Nor do I wish to retire as did he, even for a year or so, although periodic breaks in places such as Walden have always wound up both refreshing and challenging me.
If anyone might wonder, yes, I have visited Walden Pond once, many years ago, and wound up standing on the edge simply gazing over the water and into what is left of the woods for a good 30 minutes.
For me Walden has come to represent an interior place, one that I can, if I so choose, recreate for myself wherever I may be, including the waiting room of a busy modern airport.
After I first read the book in 1956 - for I would periodically return to it many times over the ensuing 5 decades - I began to reflect on a regular basis. At first it was on scraps of paper, then later I would always have a spiral notebook and pen in my pocket.
Much of what I wrote was inane, artless, as I struggled to find both my voice and appropriate foci for my attention.
Over time this would lead to my coming here, and to some of what I write hear. I had become accustomed both to observing and to commenting.
Most of all, I learned not to be afraid of the first person singular, that one letter pronoun, about which Thoreau reflects so cogently and so early in this book, which is why I began with that paragraph.
This is one book that is a forever part of who I am, who I have become. My reactions to it change over time, as I myself change, a change that is in large part due to my learning how to observe and reflect, things to which I may have naturally been oriented, but which i first meaningfully encountered sitting on the floor upstairs in late 1956 at 1 Huguenot Drive, Larchmont NY, with a book bound in faded green leather in my lap.
And now, let me allow Henry David to speak for himself. Please, take the time to ponder the words, to let them echo in your mind, redound in your heart. Then perhaps you will begin to understand the effect they have had on me, and still do. Then perhaps you will find your own reaction.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four different senses; illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas"; but in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and "entertainment" pass for nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him.
Peace