91�Թ���

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection . . .
Henry David Thoreau,��Walden

��

This Saturday, March 13, will be the one-year anniversary of the lockdown of the University of Colorado campus, when the offices of the Center of the American West closed down, and I began working at home.

As I approach the one-year anniversary of an entirely unexpected escalation in the time I spend in solitude, my thoughts naturally turn to Henry David Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau was a very odd bird.

It takes one to know one.

Thus, in my deliberations on the one-year anniversary of the lockdown, I am taking this occasion to offer Henry David Thoreau a posthumous appointment as my co-president of the Society of Mavericks Brought Together Across Time.

If he were to turn this down—as he most certainly would—I would be OK with that.

But my offer would still stand.

��

The Pioneer Of The Exit Strategy

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau went to live by himself at Walden Pond. In the book��Walden, he spends a full calendar year in his cabin, which works very well for letting the seasons organize the story, setting him up to make the last full chapter a welcoming of spring.

In actuality, he lived there for more than two years, and left in September of 1847. As he wrote, in full disclosure, he was “putting the experience of two years into one.”

Thus, true to form, Thoreau disrupted my one-year-anniversary literary intentions. If he had spent exactly one year at Walden Pond, I would now have an exact match—really a��perfect��match—with my intention to use “Not my First Rodeo” to reflect on one year of solitude.

Well, no such luck.

Henry David Thoreau rarely cooperated with any expectations of his predictability. He was a contrarian and maverick who makes me look like a submissive conformist. To use one small example, he was named David Henry Thoreau, but he turned that around. Given his scale of contrariness, it is a wonder he didn’t go for a total scrambling of his given name and recreate himself as David Thoreau Henry.

When it comes to defiance of chronology, the people of the past can be very squirrely, sneaking around and pulling off tricks like collapsing two years into one. Take that famous fellow John Wesley Powell: in his memorable book,��The Canyons of the Colorado, Powell merged��two��descents of the Colorado River into��one��descent of the Colorado River. Chronological trickery of this sort is one bedrock reason why historians develop the determination, early in their careers, to try not to be suckers.

This determination is usually phrased as “always examine evidence carefully.” However we word it, one of the greatest gifts that historians could give to this nation would be figuring out a way to get our aspiration—“try not to be a sucker”—more widely adopted by our fellow Americans.

So Thoreau actually lived by himself near Walden Pond for two years and two months, not a year. As we complete our one year of social distancing and remote working, we can only hope that we won’t be forced to follow his timing and extend our stay in the regime of comparative solitude.

I am far from the only commentator to think we could learn from Thoreau in the times of the pandemic. If internet searches accurately reveal trends in mood and thought, in the Spring of 2020, there was a small surge in the conviction that the spread of Covid-19 meant that we should consult Thoreau’s��Walden. But the internet searches also reveal that the trend petered out pretty fast and has not made a resurgence. This is surprising because the relevance of this book is measurably greater now than it was in March and April of last year.

At the risk of a Thoreauvian self-indulgence, I will use my own relationship to this wildly complicated writer as the foundation for making my case for the heightened relevance of his experiment at Walden Pond.

There are two major differences between Henry David Thoreau and me (and, yes, there are several million other differences, and also a few similarities, but we’ll focus on the two big differences).

��

Difference #1:

He lived in solitude in a small, stark cabin at Walden Pond because this was his deliberate choice.

��I live in solitude in a very comfortable home in Boulder because I deferred to a mandate for social distancing.

��

Difference #2:

He had an exit strategy for departing from solitude.

I do not have any such strategy.

��

Living More Lives

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.

Henry David Thoreau,��Walden

When I contemplate Thoreau’s succinct premise for his exit strategy—“I had several more lives to live” —and try to apply it to 2021, I head straight to a muddle.

I believe that I, too, have “several more lives to live.” But will those lives unfold in a return to the satisfaction of hosting well-attended, in-person public gatherings? Will I return to the exhilaration and stimulus of traveling around to give speeches?

Or will I surprise myself—and everyone who knows me—by choosing to hold onto the pleasures of solitude that I discovered through forced isolation?

And then there’s a far more serious muddle:

As I try to chart a new course, how will I hold onto and respect the memories of the more than 500,000 Americans who—because of Covid-19—do not have “more lives to live”?

Before he went to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s brother John died from tetanus at age 27. After Thoreau left Walden Pond and while he was writing the book��Walden, his sister Helen died of tuberculosis when she was 36. Thoreau himself had shown the indications of tuberculosis himself when he was a student at Harvard.

Henry David Thoreau wrote the words, “perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live” when he knew that his brother John and his sister Helen had no “more lives to live,” and when he also knew that his own life might be cut short by the disease that killed Helen. This was a realistic fear; tuberculosis killed him at age 44.

With the untimely deaths of his brother and sister in my mind, it is impossible not to quote from the��Book of Isaiah. When he went to Walden Pond, and when he wrote the book��Walden, Henry David Thoreau was still a youthful “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

With this in our minds, Thoreau’s oft-quoted statement of intention evokes an undertone that reaches to the most sorrowful depths of the soul:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

This proves to be a statement that brings despair and optimism, grief and hope, together to provide a nearly unbearable relevance for 2021.

Here is a tenable, Thoreau-inspired speculation for how we might see each other in our time on the planet: we are, all of us, grief-stricken, though that may be concealed and hidden. The acquaintanceship we share with grief could be the arena in which we find unity and solidarity.

��

Getting Reacquainted With Thoreau

In the scale of the unfathomable losses, disruptions, injuries, and deaths of the last year, the fact that I have had the opportunity to get reunited with Henry David Thoreau surely registers as a very trivial event. But there is no concealing the pleasure that this reunion has given me.

Nearly fifty years ago, I spent a significant amount of quality time with Thoreau. When I was in graduate school, Professor James McIntosh convened us for a course in American literature of the mid-nineteenth century. In a very intense part of the course, Professor McIntosh installed a familiarity with��Walden, as well as the essays “Walking” and “Civil Disobedience,” as a permanent fixture of our minds.

But here is another aspect of that course that also remains as a permanent feature in my memory. Sometimes Thoreau was so cryptic that I could not break the code. In the early 1970s, I thought these episodes of befuddlement were a result of my deficiency of intellect.

But now, in 2021, I have been given the relief of this recognition:

Every now and then, Thoreau was utterly, self-indulgently cryptic and mystifying.

In case you doubt this recognition, test your wits with this famous passage from��Walden:

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken with concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

WHAT?

If any reader can interpret this passage so that I can experience even a moment of thinking, “Oh!���ճ󲹳�’s��what he meant,” I will take that astonishingly smart person out for a long, leisurely dinner, as soon as I develop “the exit strategy from solitude” that will make such an outing possible.

For now, I will stick with what I remember from the early 1970s: I worked very hard to understand every sentence that Thoreau wrote, and much of the time, he won, and I lost.

But a few days of rereading��Walden��have delivered liberation: I now fully recognize that Thoreau could be very obscure and proportionately uninviting and discouraging to people who he did not think were worth his time.

A nervous, self-doubting twenty-two-year-old graduate student at Yale seems to have been one of those people.

More important, even as Thoreau sometimes tried to throw me off his trail, I carried away from Jim McIntosh’s course two assets that constantly gain in value.

First, Thoreau made it clear that in our life on the planet, we occupied an arena that was packed with symbols, presenting a constant swirl of sights and encounters and events and patterns that an alert observer could seize on and turn into stories and reflections.

Second, I found in Thoreau’s irreverence and forthrightness an approach I wanted to try for myself.

Thank you, Professor James McIntosh, for a very useful course; and thank you, Henry David Thoreau, for at once confusing me and orienting me with such vigor.

��

It’s Never Too Late To Give “Deliberately” A Try

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote. We know that “deliberately” has multiple meanings, but we also know from that statement that Thoreau took up solitude��on purpose.

That returns us to the unmistakable and almost intractable contrast: In July of 1845, he��chose��his circumstances, and in March of 2020, most of us were��picked up and plunked down��in our circumstances.

Well, so we didn’t��deliberately��choose solitude.

So what?

The word��deliberately��can still save us.

For those of us who have escaped serious illness or financial hardship or psychological anguish, the adverb��deliberately is still well within our reach. When we start to take an action, we are free to keep asking ourselves, “Am I taking this action impulsively or compulsively or compliantly or defiantly or witlessly . . . or����������������ٱ����?”

Unless I missed a law buried in the rule book of the universe, there is nothing that says that the option to live “deliberately” carries a shelf-life subject to expiration or a tight “USE BY” date. As participants in Thoreau’s experiment in testing and stretching the powers of our will, we may be late-in-the-day applicants, but we have not missed the deadline.

Literally.

��

And Now Really Good News:

Solitude And Sociability Cohabit

Read or reread��Walden, paying particular attention to Chapter Six, “Visitors,” and Chapter Eight, “The Village,” and you will be vaccinated against the misapprehension that the embrace of solitude requires a retreat from—or even a rejection of—the rest of humanity. Indeed, if we take Thoreau as our example, we will know that solitude is more likely to mean negotiating a peace with ourselves, a peace that will heighten the pleasure of companionship and conversation.

On this count, I cannot avoid the conviction that Henry David Thoreau is my comrade and even kinsman.

Neither of us came near wilting under the burdens of loneliness and isolation because 1) we kept in touch with plenty of people, and 2) if we were alone when we sat in our homes, or if we were alone when we walked on solid ground, we still felt we were in good company.

Over the last century and a half, quite a number of people have felt it was their mission to declare, “Thoreau claimed to have chosen solitude in his time at Walden Pond, but he actually had plenty of visitors at his cabin, and he often walked the mile and a half to the village of Concord.”

That remark is protected under the First Amendment, even as it is burdened with a misguided and smarmy assumption that solitude and sociability are arranged in an either/or opposition.

Thoreau and I both knew from the beginning—or at least we figured out fast—that solitude was only going to be tolerable if we got to see other people often.

But now we come to the big difference between us that may seem to invalidate my claim of our kinship.

I have Zoom, and Thoreau did not.

This forces me to advance a completely untenable and doubtful speculation.

I think Henry David Thoreau might have liked Zoom.

How could I say such an improbable thing?

Because he often wrote of communities in distant places, scattered around the planet, that entranced and intrigued him. So the idea—that he might have enjoyed chatting with people in Oregon and Zanzibar—actually falls within the reach of imagination.

And because Thoreau’s stance toward the railroad that ran near Walden Pond was the complete embodiment of ambivalence toward technology. Yes, he was the one who wrote, “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides on us.” But the railroad causeway was often his route when he walked to Concord. He took pleasure in the company of the railroad workers. He wrote appreciatively of the sound of the whistle and the sound of the wheels of the cars on the track.

So rather than assume that Thoreau would have abhorred the disembodied appearances we make on Zoom, it seems imaginable that he would have matched our ability to feel equal measures of dismay over digital technology and appreciation for—and reliance on—its power to connect us across the divisions of space and time.

Well, OK, if I am now claiming that Thoreau would have felt at home on Zoom—though resolutely refusing even to consider muting himself—it is clearly time to bring this post to a close, with one last deliberation on our common ground.

��

The Persistence Of Winnowing

Henry David Thoreau and I shared an enthusiasm for life at a lectern or podium.

In his time, communities organized Lyceums, where citizens gathered to listen and thus to harvest ideas for later reflection and discussion. The Lyceum movement was just getting started when Thoreau was young, but he did his best to catch that wave. He was resolute in his unwillingness to join organizations, but he willingly accepted invitations to speak at Lyceums in his vicinity, and he even accepted the position of curator of the Concord Lyceum.

While I will not propose rechristening the Center of the American West as the Lyceum of the American West, I fully recognize the institutional kinship and line of descent from the New England Lyceum and the innumerable public forums that the Center has hosted.

I am particularly struck—and pretty darned moved—by my convergence with one particular aspect of Thoreau’s enthusiasm for public speaking: he used the opportunity to give a lecture as a chance to test his ideas and to select what he would later put into print.

A good share of his most noted writings first entered the world as speeches. “Winnowing” is the term he used for this process: using a living, present audience to field-test ideas and to decide which passages would go on permanent record in publications.

More by happenstance than by conscious imitation of Henry David Thoreau, when I entered the world of public speaking in the late 1980s, I quickly turned into a winnower myself. I watched closely as audiences tilted forward in their seats, conveying engagement and attention, and I also watched closely as audiences leaned back in their seats and away from me, conveying, at least momentarily, a clear wish that they had made a different choice on how to spend their evening.

In the last year, many aspects of our lives have flown apart and fragmented. But other aspects of our lives have become more coherent and even more unified.

The ideas that appear here in writing had their first run as a speech to the good souls at Boulder’s Frasier Meadows on Tuesday evening, March 9, in a speakers series providentially named the Frasier Meadows Lyceum.

Circulated now on digital media, this post, “Specialist in Solitude and Impresario of Isolation,” began as a talk delivered on Zoom. The subtitle, “Seeking Guidance from Henry David Thoreau,” applies to the very method of its creation, since I was putting the good souls of my Tuesday night audience to work in helping me realize what I should keep and what I should delete from that maiden run.

And, really, I believe that this story supports my claim that Henry David Thoreau would have made his peace with Zoom. This man’s desire—to choose and arrange words with care, to freight them with the deepest meaning they could carry, and to dispatch them into the minds of his fellow human beings—was so overpowering that I feel confident in making this concluding assertion.

After an initial phase of scorn for and resistance to the deep weirdness of giving a speech on Zoom, Henry David Thoreau would have said,

“OK, send me the �����԰�.”

If you find this blog contains ideas worth sharing with friends, please forward this��to them. If you are reading this for the first time, join our����to receive the��Not my First Rodeo��blog every Friday.

��

Photo Credit:

Henry David Thoreau banner image courtesy of:

Walden Book banner image courtesy of: