CONCORD REBEL

Henry David Thoreau: Concord Rebel

Concord Rebel was the title chosen by August Derleth for his biography of Henry David Thoreau. It is surely an appropriate one....

He was born on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. It is hard to imagine Thoreau as the product of any other place or culture than that of New England. Yet throughout his entire life, he travelled the world and reveled in it  -- without ever moving very far from Concord, for any length of time.

Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that Thoreau was an iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. And Thoreau's works are littered with classical and other references and allusions, showing clearly that he had absorbed much throughout his formal education.

After college Thoreau began to teach. After giving that up, he worked in the family business -- pencil manufacturing. But soon his precise knowledge of the locality, his skill at observation, and his eye for detail ensured his "drift" into land-surveying.

But Thoreau's true education -- and the start of his true teaching career -- began when he started to understand and act on what he learnt in his everyday life, coming to terms with Nature and how his own nature, and thus all humanity, was inevitably influenced by it. I am...one who faces West oftener than East -- walks out of the house with a better grace than he goes in -- who loves winter as well as summer -- forest as well as field -- darkness as well as light. 

Thoreau began to write about his travels. One book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers describes the voyage of the title. And yet it is also an example of Thoreau launching out on a voyage, one that was as much of the mind -- if not more so -- than of the body and senses. There seems to be very little that doesn't come under his gaze: history, ethics, religion, and much else.

This voyage through a small part of New England proved to be an effective dry-run for Thoreau's greatest voyage of all -- one made while living in a small hut within easy walking-distance of his birthplace.

In March 1845, Thoreau went to the woods "to transact some business with nature." The result was Walden.

Thoreau's account of the way that he built his cabin is a delight. He combines sheer practicality with utmost artistry. His prose is as rugged and sharp as a flint arrowhead: I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, where I intended to build my house...the owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it.

For two years Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, in a sort of retirement that enabled him to participate the more fully in the world: I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...

Thoreau's chiseled language combines a sturdy simplicity with an innate grandeur. The reader is vividly alongside Thoreau as he goes about, transacting his business with Nature in the woods, or entertains visitors -- he wouldn't have made much of the distinction between human and animal.

Walden moves slowly, grandly, and wittily amongst the cycles of the seasons and the years, of the affairs of the inhabitants of the Walden Pond woods and the new cabin, towards the exulted final chapters where Thoreau describes the coming of Spring and the many rebirths that it embraces and symbolises. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquarians chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, -- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. 

In the midst of life there is change and rebirth -- and destruction. They are inseparable. The passage just quoted is modern-sounding, yet echoes much of the (native North American) Indian view of the world, one that even in Thoreau's time had largely been overthrown. It sums up a paradox in Thoreau: his minute interest in everything around him, all forms of life, landscape, and effect. And yet there is a cosmic chill, a sense of proportion and the certain knowledge that everything changes, is fluid, gets transformed. Everything.

Thoreau "finally" left Walden on 6 September 1847. Characteristically there is no sentimentality: 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.

Possibly the Conclusion to Walden is the finest and most exhilarating part of the book. Thoreau sums up his own attitude and his own rebellion: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. It is possibly a very New England sort of rebellion: one that doesn't set out to draw any attention to itself, but which allows the rebel complete integrity, and also profoundly touches others to come across it.

Thoreau's most obvious "rebellion" led to the writing of his other great contribution to world civilisation, Civil Disobedience.

After spending a night in jail for not paying his highway tax, Thoreau was by default compelled to meditate on the nature of humanity as a political animal, and how humanity and individual people could and should relate to human-created institutions, especially the State.

Quoting the current political motto "That government is best which governs least", Thoreau immediately makes the logical connection that no governing at all would be even better. But as a realist, he sees that government is something that isn't going to go away -- people will have to put up with it, and must hold it to account at all times.

For Thoreau, complacency is not an option. He decided how he would come to terms with being governed. I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject... I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State... I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man or a musket to shoot one with, -- the dollar is innocent, -- but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance.

This is rebellion. It is civil disobedience. It is people thinking for themselves, walking to the beat of that different drummer. (Apparently each 15 April the United States Internal Revenue Service receives several blank tax-returns, with a copy of Civil Disobedience attached.) This sort of rebellion, by its non-violent, individual nature, and its enduring appeal to a few, because it is hard work. But what a vision....

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own purpose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. 

Maybe it is easier to walk to a different drummer in the woods around Walden Pond than anywhere else. But Thoreau tried to do it all of the time. It was an approach  that bred respect, but not endearment. As Emerson recorded a mutual friend saying: "I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree." There can have been few people so unwilling to compromise, yet whose integrity and refusal to be dehumanised can evoke so much in the way of bemused admiration and envy as Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau died on 6 May 1862. When asked whether or not he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied that he did not know that they had ever quarrelled. 

The final words of Walden are: There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

To visit Walden Pond would be the equivalent of a religious pilgrimage for me. And the private Walden of the mind is where I want to be, and can only seem to visit and gain strength from at all-too infrequent intervals. Walden is the world, nature, people, engagement and encounter with them all. Yet it is also the heart's desire, the love never quite caught and held, the backward glance.

In 1967 the United States Post Office issued a postage stamp in commemoration of Henry David Thoreau. (Click here to see it.)

August Derleth concludes Walden Pond: Homage to Thoreau, his account of three short visits there: I turned, too, looking over my shoulder before the enclosing trees concealed the last of that blue water .

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard