If You Have Built Castles in the Air...

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau, a member of the transcendental movement centered in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 19th century, retreated to Walden Pond in 1845. During the two years and some odd months Thoreau spent at Walden, he kept a journal, went to town on the train every week to buy his vegetables, and spent every Saturday night, and sometimes Sunday nights too, at his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house. He had visitors; he did not eat the beans and other food that he grew himself; he had Emerson’s permission to live at Walden since the land belonged to him. He did not have any steady employment, working on and off as a handyman for Emerson, surveying; Thoreau had given up teaching, for which he’d trained, after a few months in New York, homesick for his beloved New England.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

While the preceding paragraph may disappoint Green movement followers, just as it seems to disappoint undergraduate students, Thoreau did not exactly live the life he wrote about in Walden. Walden is not, as many people seem to think, a journal or a diary. Thoreau used the diary he kept in the two-plus-years he lived at Walden for many of the observations and ideas that appear in Walden, yet Walden itself does not accurately portray Thoreau’s life. Some people think this makes Thoreau a liar. However, Thoreau intended Walden to be something else entirely: a work of art.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Thoreau understood the fundamental tenets of rebellion: rebels are most often merely rebelling against one set of normative rules only to conform to another set of rules. Thoreau is the rebel’s rebel. The transcendentalist movement, was rebelling against the materialistic society that had sprung up in 19th century America after the onset of the Industrial Revolution (and we all thought American society had become materialistic in the last 20-30 years, rather the last 200). Thoreau felt pressured by the various transcendental communes springing up in the area and decided to avoid having to join in by living at Walden by himself, rebelling against what had become normative behavior for a transcendentalist.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…

In actuality, Walden consists of a series of meditations and ideas, written in a linear progression with a series of cycles woven throughout an annual cycle. Thoreau compressed his two years at Walden Pond into one year for the purposes of the book and repeats this cycle in large and small ways. He structured the book this way, in micro and macrocosms, to represent the unity of nature: one moment, one day, one year, one life, one humanity, one nature. Thoreau decided to live at Walden Pond in the first place because he believed that Western civilization had already achieved its peak and he wanted to experience the simplicity of nature, to which we all ultimately return.

I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for many a thousand more,--the same sweet song of yore.

Thoreau’s prose flows beautifully, in an almost poetic style. He employs series of binary oppositions, or paired ideas, to develop his meditations, such as the individual vs. the group, solitude vs. society, winter vs. spring, all in a circular pattern to represent the unity of nature and how Thoreau viewed himself as merging with nature. Walden is not really about a man going to live in the woods, it’s about spiritual regeneration by obeying the cyclical laws of nature.

Reading the italicized sentence above, Thoreau tells the reader that he heard a robin, the first harbinger of spring. He writes that it was the first he had heard for “many a thousand years,” meaning through the long winter but also that he, as representing humanity or nature, had heard it every year for a thousand years. He then goes on to say that he would remember the robin’s call “for many a thousand more,” as the earth completed one seasonal cycle, and began a new cycle with the onset of spring and the robins coming back each year.

…I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.

My edition of Walden also contains Civil Disobedience. Although Thoreau titled his essay Resistance to Civil Government, the phrase Civil Disobedience is firmly grounded in the American consciousness, not only as the title of Thoreau’s essay, but as a peaceful political movement as practiced by Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., despite the efforts of academia to return to Thoreau’s original title. Thoreau’s treatise discusses his opposition to slavery and the methods he believes should and must be employed for the abolition of slavery. He also discusses what he viewed as citizens enslaving themselves by falsely believing they needed the security provided by the federal government. Thoreau uses the example of the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay a nine-shilling tax during the time he lived at Walden Pond. He demonstrates in that passage how his body might have been imprisoned by four walls, but his mind ranged free, just as it always did, and how the minds of others seemed confined whether their bodies were in jail or not.

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.

Walden is indeed a work of art, and fully deserving of all the attention it gets as part of the American literary canon. Whether Walden is a credo for the Green movement or just a wake-up call for those of us leading lives of quiet desperation, it’s a book worth reading, and reading again, for the sheer buoyancy of its prose and the clarity of its message.

[Note: all italicized section headings taken from Walden or Civil Disobedience]