Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls

Author:Laura Dassow Walls [Walls, Laura Dassow]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Hermit at Home

Through these years, Henry Thoreau’s outward life was quiet and industrious. Though he went out virtually every day, he rarely went farther than Boston, where he would head out to Long Wharf to gaze on the ocean before making the rounds to Harvard Library and the Boston Society of Natural History. With rare exceptions, from May 1852 until fall 1854 he even kept his schedule clear of lectures. Yet these quiet years were the most creative of his life. For 1852 and 1853, his Journal alone fills 1,253 rich and provocative pages. He also wrote something over five hundred pages of notes in his Indian Books and two new drafts of Walden, which doubled in size. These pages show his inner life was as extravagant and inventive as his outer life was steady and disciplined. Indeed, his contented homelife provided the stability Thoreau needed to pursue his career the way that he did. Against Emerson the patriarch, Hawthorne the political appointee, Channing the occasionally loveable misanthrope, or Alcott, whose flights to the Ideal were anchored by the hard work of Abigail and their daughters, Thoreau bought his freedom by keeping his needs simple and his account books balanced to the half cent.

Yet Thoreau in these years was no hermit, though Emerson thought so, or worse. “Emerson is too grand for me,” Thoreau muttered. “He belongs to the nobility & wears their cloak & manners,” and even his praise felt patronizing. The low point came in spring of 1852: “He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion,” and he “curses my practice even,” accusing Thoreau of committing his thoughts selfishly to a journal instead of sharing them. Wounded, Thoreau called Emerson’s “awful” curse down upon himself: “I pray that if I am the cold intellectual skeptic who he rebukes his curse may take effect—& wither & dry up those sources of my life—and my journal no longer yield me pleasure or life.”22 Meanwhile, Emerson had his own complaints: Thoreau’s new project of endless journalizing looked like empty procrastination, a way to postpone real accomplishment. “But all this old song I have trolled a hundred times already,” he sighed. “Only, last night, Henry Thoreau insisted much on ‘expansions,’ & it sounded new.” Well, maybe it was new. Emerson was always willing to listen, even push back, knowing it took some opposition, “a little sense of victory, a roll of the drums,” to call up his friend’s highest powers.23 So they stumbled on together in their mutual misunderstandings, friends yoked in opposition.

Yet when Emerson needed a steady and capable hand, he called on Henry. When his elderly mother died, in November 1853, Henry handled the arrangements, and when distinguished lecturers needed a host or an escort, Emerson counted on Henry’s “courtesy & counsel” to smooth the way. Still, the distance between the two did not close. Thoreau wrote into Walden a sad epitaph for their friendship: “There was one other with

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