A Fugitive in Walden Woods by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658238
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2017-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

V

Later that summer, Henry went to jail. Sam Staples, who had offered to pay his poll tax, walked sheepishly beside him, past the poor farm, the poorhouse, across the Mill-dam, and into the Middlesex jailhouse. Henry took possession of his second-story cell like a dog a manger or, better said, a doge his summer palace. For subjects, he had only one: a “barn burner.” He, too, had been careless with the god’s gift to humankind, which Heraclitus deemed the soul’s chief constituent, together with water, the baser part.

That night, a drunkard in the cell below Henry’s called on the darkness to answer a question.

“What is life?”

The night gave no answer, so the questioner provided one: “So this is life!”

“What is life?” he asked again, and, after a silence, once more replied, “So this is life!”

“What is life?”

“So this is life!”

“What is life?”

“So this is life!”

The drunkard examined the night like a witness in the dock, but the night had no answer for him—not having seen any more than the sot did of what lay inside the heart’s darkness, or else being unwilling to disclose it.

The tedious litany continued for some time, until Henry called out to him in exasperation, “Well, what is life, then?”

Neither the drunkard nor the night made reply.

Henry had been searching for the answer since his Harvard days. He had looked for it in books, in the wilds, in conversation with Emerson, Channing, Fuller, Alcott, Hawthorne, and his brother, John. Never having found it, did he stand by his cell window or with an ear to the floor, straining with every particle of his being to hear what a drunkard would say? For a moment, did he have the greatest of expectations of finding the answer to philosophy’s fundamental concern in the Middlesex jailhouse, on a hot July night in 1846?

Giving no more thought to his place in the universe than a badger would, the barn burner began to sing “Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken.” I sometimes wonder whether simple men might not be nearer the truth than the titans among us, if only they had the ambition to speak it.

I remember standing outside the jailhouse that night and calling as loudly as I dared to the barred window of his cell: “Henry, Henry Thoreau.” I could see Sam Staples in his house across the alley from the jail, sitting at his supper table. Fortunately, he did not look up from his plate.

The silence seemed absolute—deaf as I was in my nervousness to the noise of crickets, night birds, mosquitoes, creak of branches, and the occasional restless nickering of a horse. To have raised my voice in order to be heard would have shattered the night like a pane of glass, or at least it would have shattered my strained nerves. The moment brought back for me the fear and stealth of nights when I would creep outside into the dark rather than use the common straw and—later—nights spent on Ragged Island, sick with fever, during my flight from Master and Mistress Jeroboam’s South.

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