On Henry David Thoreau

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.

Thoreau went to the woods, he said, to “live deliberately” and according to his own scheme of economy – represented by his beanfield. Visitors were not encouraged (he had cutlery enough for only one person and a half), and he devoted himself to the Higher Philosophy between berrying excursions. Yet it turns out, according to a piece in the New Yorker entitled “Pond Scum”, that Thoreau regularly swerved from his self-proclaimed virtue to dine with friends in Concord!

For Thoreau, trees were creative and spiritual companions, sane-making and essential. His love of them is documented in Thoreau and the Language of Trees - a selection of his meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins.

The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. Thoreau, knowing his Greek, loving puns and etymologies, was likely quite deliberate in the choice of ‘Economy’ as his title for the longest and first chapter in Walden (1854), believes Psyche. By living in his spartan little pond house, his oikos, and getting this house in order, as it were, Thoreau meant to help others get their houses in order - and, house by house, family by family, give new life to society.

The Past Present Future podcast explored Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars. How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion? Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite? And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?