A Less Than Thoreau Examination

It’s a safe bet that mostly monks and scholars would consider the life and writings of ruminator extraordinaire Henry David Thoreau a breezy summer read. Here at the satellite branch, however, we occasionally get lost among the stacks and emerge with something different. 

Hank D. was a 19th century American essayist, naturalist, abolitionist, free thinker and unlikely Employee of the Month best known for wandering the woods and influencing movements that knotted the knickers of not one but two empires. His signature works are “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience,” unaligned efforts that may have more in common than at first glance. His most well-known line might be, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” which he wrote without an inkling of Vanderbilt University football or Buffalo Sabres fans. 

Thoreau read and thought broadly, and his writings are sprinkled with references to classic Greek and Roman literature and Chinese and Hindu teachings and philosophy. He influenced a slew of writers, among them Hemingway and Yeats and Upton Sinclair and George Bernard Shaw, and a legion of naturalists and ecological writers and advocates. He has spawned biographies and entire college courses devoted to his life and work. I don’t have the expertise to provide more than a snapshot and a suggestion that he’s worth at least a glance if you have the time. 

“Walden” was a result of 26 months spent living by himself in a cabin he built next to a pond near Concord, Mass., on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

Like many who question the status quo, Thoreau was often viewed as eccentric during his lifetime and more widely appreciated after his death. He wasn’t anti-capitalism but thought the pursuit of material wealth more hamster wheel than path to prosperity. He wasn’t anti-social but at times through his writings it’s easy to infer that he was more enamored with the concept of human beings and their potential than with actual people and relationships. “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind,” he wrote. “Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” 

If Hank D. was disappointed that people often chased wealth and status over personal growth and fulfillment, he was downright salty about government control and the institutional practice of slavery. “A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it,” he wrote in “Civil Disobedience.” “Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? – in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have the right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.” 

Thoreau was a staunch abolitionist and vocal critic of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, which was prompted by the U.S. annexation of Texas and expanded the national footprint from the Rio Grande River to the Pacific Ocean. He viewed the war as imperial over-reach as well as potential new territory for slavery to be implemented. He wrote of the natural “friction” within the machinery of government – inefficiencies and even small, tolerable injustices. “But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer,” he wrote. “In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” 

Mohandas Gandhi encountered Thoreau’s writings while noodling a resistance movement against British imperialism, first as a young man living in South Africa and later in his native India. According to author and historian George Hendrick, on a 1931 train trip in France with ACLU chairman Roger Baldwin, Gandhi carried a copy of “Civil Disobedience” and told him the essay “contained the essence of his political philosophy, not only as India’s struggle related to the British, but as to his own views of the relation of citizens to government.” 

Martin Luther King took cues from Gandhi to form his own version of non-violent resistance as part of the Civil Rights Movement, which indirectly led him to Hank D. In his autobiography King wrote, “I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest.” 

Thoreau didn’t live to see the end of slavery in America. He died in 1862 at age 44 after a bout with bronchitis. He believed that people and their institutions could be, should be, better. It required work, or at least a shift in thought and priorities. Give him the last word: “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.”