The voice within – a pilgrimage to Walden Pond
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 3 September
ON a recent visit to the United States, I made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, a glistening body of water prized for its depth and clarity (only 20 miles from Boston) as well as for its association with the visionary writer, Henry David Thoreau. From July 1845 to September 1847, Thoreau made his home here, living simply in a small self-built cabin, tending his garden, studying the changing seasons, recording the details of the natural life surrounding him, trying to ascertain, by experiment, how much of modern life is given over to the superfluous, how much we could really do without.
The result was his book Walden, or Life in the Woods, a masterpiece of flinty English prose. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he declared. The only escape was in heeding the voice within: “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.” By the shore of Walden Pond, Thoreau embarked on a voyage which he insisted was of more profit than the celebrated overseas adventures of the day. “Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice.”
Today Thoreau is recognised as a prophet of the environmental movement and an early, trenchant critic of consumerism. His impatience with the wasteful public babble of modern civilisation feels more pertinent than ever. We are inundated with words and images, yet seem increasingly incapable of responding to them meaningfully.
Walden Pond is now conscientiously preserved by the State of Massachusetts (an entity Thoreau regarded as little more than a criminal conspiracy). The foundations of his refuge are marked, and next to them a pile of small stones has risen over the years, as generations of visitors pay an anonymous, appropriately geological homage to the man and the book. Nearby, there’s a shop run by the admirable Thoreau Society, stocked with memorabilia, books, CDs, postcards, and tee shirts emblazoned with Thoreau’s words, my favourite being, “Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.”
Thoreau is sometimes presented as an American sanyassin, but even in retreat, he was an active participant in his society. In July 1846, he was arrested and jailed for a night for refusing to pay his poll tax. In a lecture later published under the title ‘Civil Disobedience’, he explained why, in certain circumstances, the only place for a just individual in an unjust society was prison. Thoreau was a militant opponent of slavery and of the Mexican-American war of 1846-48 – through which the U.S. seized from Mexico the area now occupied by the states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado. “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 revolutionise,” he wrote, and added, in words that ought to be broadcast today across the U.S. and Britain, “What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”
Those who derided his act of “civil resistance” as a meaningless gesture “do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” Gandhi encountered this essay in 1906, in the midst of his South Africa campaign, as he was formulating his doctrine of Satyagraha. “It left a deep impression on me,” he later recalled, describing it as “scientific confirmation of what I was doing.”
Gandhi’s U.S. disciple, Martin Luther King, found comfort in Thoreau’s arguments on the eve of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56: “I remembered how, as a college student, I had been moved when I first read this work. I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, `We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system’.”
Unlike Gandhi and King, Thoreau was not a pacifist. When, in 1859, John Brown led an attack on an armoury in Harper’s Ferry (now in West Virginia) in hopes of sparking a slave uprising, he was denounced by the moderate wing of the abolitionist movement, but defended by Thoreau, who saw Brown’s audacious raid “as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history.” He praised Brown as a true hero, to be elevated above those who merely fought their country’s foes, because “he had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong.”
Thoreau was contemptuous of those who excoriated Brown’s resort to violence while passively endorsing the more sustained violence sponsored by their own government, and not only against slaves. “We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows!”
Referring to the weapons Brown and his band used at Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau observed: “I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause.”
Fourteen months after John Brown was hanged, the U.S. plunged into civil war. Another fourteen months after that, the 44-year-old Thoreau died of tuberculosis, his repute as a writer restricted to small literary circles in the Boston area. Like Brown, Thoreau was derided in his day as “crazy” and “impractical”. Yet, still, today, the stones pile up by Walden Pond, and his words rise above the ubiquitous din, making us look again at the overlooked, in our world and in our selves.
