A Pilgrim’s Progress

by Elder M. Lindahl

On Wednesday, June 8, I walked the shore of Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau had walked. I was teaching a course on “Thoreau’s World: A Study in New England Transcendentalism,” at Pilgrim Pines, New Hampshire. Students from my course followed along the path from the parking lot to the site where Thoreau built his 10x15 one-room cabin. The original cabin, which he built by himself for $28.125, is gone, but the exact location of it near Deep Cove on the Northern shore is well-marked. A cairn of rocks begun years ago as a monument has grown to a huge mound. Teacher and students alike showed their respect to the old cabin builder and his views, adding their own pebbles to the rocky shrine as a pilgrimage ritual.

Thoreau lived at Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847. The site is close to the tracks of the Fitchburg Railroad, about one mile from Concord where he was born and where his folks lived. The land on which he built was owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his older friend, employer, and mentor. The axe he used to fell the pines for his cabin belonged to Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Lousia May who wrote Little Women.

Thoreau wrote about and lived a non-materialistic life. Here was a man who took seriously Jesus’ words on possessions:

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Matthew 6:19)

And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6:28)

Although he had nothing to do with the institutional church, Thoreau expressed many thoughts similar to those of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: Whether you inherit a farm or are in jail, he says, it’s the same — you are robbed of your freedom (W, 85).¹ “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind” (W, 14). “. . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone” (W, 83). “Money is not required to buy one necessary [sic] of the soul” (W, 366).

I delight to come to my bearings, — not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by . . . . Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. (W, 366, 367)

Not at all lazy, Thoreau worked like a beaver, thinking and planning his days, keeping busy observing, searching, and writing. He was by trade a surveyor. At times, when necessary, he worked in his father’s pencil shop. His counsel from the shores of the little 62-acre pond was: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” (W, 91).

More than to challenge the materialistic life style and the supporting work ethic, Thoreau went to live in the woods to deal with the grief and guilt of his brother John’s death. John died of a tetanus infection as a result of cutting himself while shaving. The brothers, who were very close — like David (Thoreau’s given name) and Jonathan of the Old Testament — had taught together in the private school they started in Concord. They had taken a week’s rowboat excursion together one summer, and Thoreau wanted time to write about their experience. The completed account was published as A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

In his book, Walden, he wrote:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear . . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (W, 90)

Thoreau explicitly said that he is not advising anyone else to follow his lead. “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account . . . but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or mother’s or his neighbor’s instead” (W, 70).

He simply wanted to encourage us to live as individuals, to seek the truth about life, to find what is essential for living free and unencumbered. In his soul he believed that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (W, 9) and that what is commonly thought of as the good life is actually deficient and impoverished when one considers what it might be. He wrote to remind us that life is more than property, bank accounts, assets, and material things. “Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory . . .” (W, 80). “Goodness is the only investment that never fails” (W, 245).

Ironically, Walden Pond, since it was deeded by Emerson’s heirs to Middlesex county in 1922, has been the focal point of continuing environmental controversy and discussion. Some 750,000 people from all around the world visit the area annually. Many, finding the Pond defiled by business improvements and “progress,” were thoroughly² disappointed. The ecosystem balance was threatened by modern developments and increased use.

In 1985, the State of Massachusetts, attempting to reverse the commercialism of the area, razed two cement bathhouses and removed a concrete swimming pier and concrete retaining walls. About the same time, land developers wanted acreage around the Pond to build a shopping mall and luxury condominiums.

Now, in 1994, the grandiose ideas of these developers have been thwarted by local preservation entrepreneurs. Rock star Don Henley’s Walden Woods Project has raised more than $9 million from benefit concerts and grants in the last four years, according to People Magazine, to help keep the 2,680 acres surrounding Walden Pond natural.

Today the area is designated Walden Pond State Reservation. An attractive bathhouse and beach area have been built and are maintained in a natural setting. Swimming and boating are popular. The shoreline path to the site of his cabin, reinforced with timbers and granite, does show signs of erosion from the walking traffic and weather. Some areas of the woods away from the pond are fenced to prevent people from destroying the environment in which Thoreau picked berries, planted beans, observed wild life, carried on his nature studies, and reflected on life.

One can look at Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond in different ways. Some call Walden a “young man’s book,” and stressed the romantic impracticality of what is recorded. Some make a big point of his hermit existence, while others criticize him for walking the Fitchburg tracks to his mother’s table.

It must be kept in mind that his stay at Walden Pond was a brief period following his graduation from Harvard. The book, Walden, was written seven years later. He travelled to many places, exploring — the Maine woods, the White mountains, Cape Cod, and, just before his death for reasons of health, to Minnesota. After the pond experience, he said he became a sojourner in civilized life again. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” (W, 357). He had driven life into a corner and determined there was more to it than most people knew.

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 . . . . 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. (W, 358)

Thoreau’s words continue to be a profound, disturbing call to people to find for themselves what life is all about. He sounded a definite summons to responsible ecology. His essay on civil disobedience has influenced many in the area of social justice. Possessions, he wants us to know, can burden us down to such an extent that we miss really hearing the songs of the birds.

. . . Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state. . . . (W, 356)

Was Thoreau religious? Yes, but not in the Pauline sense of confession of sin, salvation, and the church; he used religious language quite sparingly. Still, he was a man who could confess that he walked and talked with the Builder of the universe.

He could think of all creatures as “resting in God’s palm.” In his Journal just after John’s death, he wrote:

I must receive my life as passively as the willow leaf that flutters over the brook. I must not be for myself, but God’s work and that is always good. I will wait the breezes patiently and grow as Nature shall determine . . . . What if you or I be dead! God is alive still. (J, March 13, 1842)

When Thoreau came to the end of his life, at age 44, one of his aunts asked whether he had made his peace with God. He replied, “I did not know, Aunt, that we had quarreled.”³ Possessed of a firm moral sense, he believed that how one lived was crucial. “There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice” (W, 245). When someone asked about the next life, Thoreau said, “One world at a time.”

I relate to him as a fellow human being, as one pilgrim to another. He took Jesus’ words and life-style, along with the Scriptures from other world faiths, seriously. He articulated these words, together with many insights of his own, into a penetrating statement that both shocks us into new awarenesses and encourages us to new ways of thinking and living. His search for enlightenment and his concern for ecology inspire us to esteem nature more highly than we have. His writings edify, inspire, and promote spiritual growth in a pilgrim’s experience.

Thoreau expressed the hope that others will find that, “the life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats” (W, 369) “Muskrats,” I take it, symbolize those encumbrances, weights, attachments, and nonessential distractions that restrict freedom and prevent new growth from happening. Lift up your hearts, pilgrims, put another stone on the cairn, and take courage as you prepare for a possible drenching of the parched uplands.