In Praise of Retreat by Kirsteen MacLeod

Author:Kirsteen MacLeod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

For millennia humans have venerated holy places in nature: springs, wells, waterfalls, rivers, forests, valleys, caves, mountains and monolithic rocks. Of sacred geographies the Dalai Lama writes, “Taken together they represent the common need in the human quest for happiness to preserve certain places as sanctuaries, reflecting perhaps each individual’s wish for inner peace.” And while humans have long been drawn back to wild edgelands for perspective, Thoreau added a modern-day geography of retreat to our repertoire: a wasteland on the outskirts of commerce.

“Walden’s general lack of utility made it an ‘outback’ with an ascetic remoteness that would attract the Transcendentalists, beginning in the 1830s,” writes Robert M. Thorson in The Guide to Walden Pond. With amazing prescience Thoreau saw the false distinction between “wild” land—uninhabited land and exalted, sweeping landscapes—and “non-wild” land, a way of thinking that has disconnected us from reality, and the natural world. “Far from being the one place on Earth that stands apart from humanity, wilderness is quite profoundly a human creation,” Cronon notes in his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Without us to set it apart, of course, there is no wilderness. He elaborates, “Wilderness is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization.” Nor is it, I might add, a consumerist “wilderness experience,” with its high peaks and endangered animals.

Thoreau’s ecological view, that humans are part of nature, meant he rejected the biblical idea—still prevalent today in Western civilization—that humans have dominion over the natural world, which he saw as a kind of hatred for life. In Genesis, humans are told, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered . . . even as the green herb have I given you all things.” Thoreau’s step back to the woods, where he noticed the small and particular in nature, was a refusal of this idea, coinciding with rampant industrialization and violent attacks on Indigenous people to force them off their lands. Battles between the army and Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo were daily news in Thoreau’s time: he recognized also that lands are contested spaces.

Walden was a new kind of margin for the age, outside the urban and industrial. Before Thoreau came to Walden, when a new road had been built, it bypassed the area. An impoverished village grew up there, where formerly enslaved people, immigrants and day labourers squatted, and no one stopped them because the land was rocky and the soil was poor. Thoreau describes resident Zilpha White, once enslaved, who built a one-room house and lived as a hermit, spinning cloth, for more than 40 years. “She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane,” he writes. White

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