Monday
Because our faculty reading group will be discussing Walden, I’ve just finished watching PBS’s illuminating three-part documentary on Henry David Thoreau. The series reveals that Thoreau was more extraordinary than I realized while also dispelling some myths about the Walden experiment. Thoreau, I learned, did not build his cabin in the woods to retreat from society but rather to understand society better. In fact, he wasn’t isolated from people since people visited him constantly. Indeed, he was quite gregarious.
Nor did he believe that one needed to travel to Walden to have his experience. He believed that we could each find our Walden wherever we lived. The documentary ends with Thoreau’s declaration,
You must live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. Find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land. There is no other life but this.
Mary Oliver, who last week I said spent her life in a very Thoreau-like quest of figuring out what makes life worth living, understands this in a deep way. In “Going to Walden” she recounts refusing to visit, even though the Cape Cod writer could get there and still “be back by nightfall.” Rather than “hurrying here and there,” she writes, Thoreau taught us that the “trick of living” is finding life “where you are.”
She hears this in Thoreau’s “far-off Yankee whisper” in “a book I read and cherish.” The book, of course, is Walden. My Sewanee colleague John Gatta, whose life was turned upside down when he encountered Walden as a boy, alerted me to the poem.
Going to Walden
By Mary Oliver
It isn’t very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are.
