I Meet Henry David Thoreau
by Glen Draeger
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Hello Civil Disobedients,
You'll be happy to know that my time-machine, the H.G. Wells, is back from the shop. For this trip I wanted to speak to Henry David Thoreau, but before I did that I decided to go to India in 1947 to visit Gandhi, the great leader who helped secure India's independence from Great Britain. Why did I do this? I'll let him tell you. He was gracious enough to give me a few minutes of his time.
"Welcome," he said to me.
"Thank you. I know it's not everyday you meet someone from the future, but I wanted to ask you what method you used against the British to free India?"
"It has been called 'nonviolent noncooperation.' I considered what the British were doing to us to be wrong, but I didn't want to use violence."
"Did any American influence you?"
"'There is no doubt that Thoreau's ideas greatly influenced my movement in India' and I think you can find the essence of my ideas in his great essay, 'Civil Disobedience.'"
Not only did Thoreau influence Gandhi, but his essay also inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. to fight against racism in our country. The British Labor movement also used the ideas in "Civil Disobedience" and groups in their party were called Walden Clubs, after Thoreau's now famous book, Walden.
Who was this man? Fezzik, my dog, and I arrived in Concord, Massachusetts in early 1862, just a few months before Thoreau died. We went to his house, but no one was there. I saw a piece of clothing on the porch and assumed it was Thoreau's, had Fezzik smell it, then told him to find him. He sat, cocked his head to one side and stared at me as if to say, "Find who?" Off in the distance down a trail in the woods I noticed a man walking. It was Thoreau.
When we caught up to him I said, "May we walk with you?"
"Certainly," he said. "'I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking . . .'"
"The art?" I asked.
"'That is,' he said practically ignoring my question, 'of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.'"
"Sauntering?"
"Yes, it's a kind of contemplative traveling. You meander through the woods or along the lake or on the seashore attending to the things around you. You do not worry about time or where you have to be or a destination. You find contentment in the moment, in being present in the present—in the walking itself."
"Ohh," I said stupidly.
"Look at your dog," he said excitedly. Fezzik, as usual, was romping around from tree to tree, sniffing, marking his territory and chasing an ocassional squirrel. "Do you think he is concerned about tomorrow? Do you think he is worried about where his next meal will come from? No. He may not understand the art of walking, but you can be certain that he lives it."
"I think I see what you mean," I said. "How did you come to believe these things?"
"I have been influenced by Emerson. I lived with his brother tutoring his children and stayed at his house when he went away to Europe. On his property I built my log cabin on Walden Pond and wrote my book, Walden."
"Yes, I know," I said. "It's a famous book."
He laughed out loud. "Hardly. It has only sold 2,000 copies, but I wasn't interested in fame, nor am I now. I spent two years at Walden Pond. I wrote about my thoughts, the animals and plants I saw there and what I did to live on a day-to-day basis. '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.'"
"Have you lived in the way that you wanted to?"
"Yes, I think I have."
"You're a writer," I said. "That's something important."
"Life is important," he said to me. "But I'm not only a writer, 'I am a Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House-Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker . . . and sometimes a Poetaster."
"What's a poetaster?" I asked.
"Someone who writes bad poetry."
"But you write it anyway?"
"What is important is the satisfaction that I get out of it. For instance, when I went to Harvard they had all these things that they wanted me to do: learn Latin and Greek, study mathematics and rhetoric and they wanted me to memorize all kinds of things. I studied, I went to the library, but I read and pursued the things I wanted to, not what they wanted me to do."
"Yes, I see. Why don't we move on to something else—I don't want my students getting any ideas."
"Oh, so you're a teacher? I was a teacher in my youth. My brother John and I opened our own school. I taught at a school before that, but they wanted me to flog pupils and I refused to do so."
"Louisa May Alcott was one of your students."
"Strange you should know that," he said. "But, yes, she was."
"Did you like teaching?"
"My brother was the most popular teacher. I had a reputation of being a discipliniarian. They called me 'Trainer Thoreau.'" Emerson once said I was 'somewhat military in nature.' But I wouldn't strictly call what I did teaching. We wanted students who were serious about learning. As teachers I think 'we should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.'"
"You have done some lecturing, haven't you?"
"Yes. I'm not a great lecturer, not like Emerson. Partly I don't like lecturing especially if those who hire me want me to tone down my words or give a 'nice' lecture. I can't do that. Probably the best speech I ever gave was 'Slavery in Massachusetts' at the Anti-Slavery Celebration at Framingham on July 4, 1854. I said what I wanted—not what I thought the audience wanted to hear."
"You are against slavery?"
"As everyone should be. I spent a night a prison because I refused to pay a poll tax."
"What does that have to do with slavery?"
"I refused to pay the tax because I did not want to support a government that sanctioned slavery. We should be willing to face the consequences of our moral actions."
"Didn't you write another book?"
"Yes, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, based on my travels with my brother. It was a wonderful trip—I'll never forget it."
"Did that book sell well?"
"Why do you keep asking that? Who cares? It was fun to write. No, it didn't sell well. 220 copies. The publisher dumped the 700 that were left over on my doorstep and I even paid to have it printed."
"Did that bother you?"
"Why should it? Whether or not the book sold well had no effect on my enjoyment of the trip. Is Charles Dickens more content than I am because his books sell well or because he has more money than I? 'The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?' I loved writing that book."
"Is that why you write in your journal?"
"How do you know about my journal?"
I ignored the question because I knew he wouldn't believe me. "You wrote over a million words in your journals and lots of people wonder why."
"I don't know myself, except to say that I enjoy writing. I enjoy solitude. 'I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.' I even proposed once to a woman, but her parents forbade the marriage. It was probably for the best."
"I thank you for talking with me," I said. "I'm going to tell my students about meeting you. Do you have any words of advice for them?"
He thought just for a moment, then said, "Yes, 'Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.'" He laughed heartily at this and so did I.
Regards,
Mr. Draeger
Please note: The sentences and phrases that appear in double qoutes(i.e. "'like this'") are the actual written words of Henry David Thoreau.
Sources:
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Sixteenth Edition, John Bartlett, Justin Kaplan, Editor, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1992.
Howarth, William, The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer, The Viking Press, New York, 1982.
The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, Ill., 1988, 15th edition, Vol. 11, pp. 725-726.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fourth Edition, Angela Partington, Editor, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1992.
Wagenknecht, Edward, Henry David Thoreau: What Manner of Man?, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1981.
©2005-2012 Glen Draeger (all rights reserved)
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