Henry David Thoreau moved into his Walden Pond cabin on July 4, 1845. In Walden, Thoreau claimed that his living experiment began on Independence Day only by accident and that others should find their own time and path to personal freedom:
I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.
In The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond, Michael Sims tracks “the Judge” — Thoreau’s boyhood nickname, earned for his habit of observant nondisclosure — through his earlier years in and about Concord, as he discovers who he might have, and then emphatically did, become. The possibilities included teacher, pencil maker, even husband, and the solemnity in the personality, Sims notes, was balanced by a love of singing and camaraderie. But as Huckleberry Finn’s adventures lead him to his river raft, Henry’s travels — often into the woods in search of huckleberries — lead him inexorably toward solid ground:
Over the years, he had sometimes looked for a hut and sometimes for land on which to build a hut.” I only ask a clean seat,” he had written in his journal as early as April 1840. “I will build my lodge on the southern slope of some hill, and take there the life the gods send me.” “I have thought,” he sighed to his journal in late 1841, “when walking in the woods through a certain retired dell, bordered with shrub oaks and pines, far from the village and affording a glimpse only through an opening of the mountains in the horizon, how my life might pass there, simple and true and natural . . . “
Thoreau offers an important lesson for us today, says Duke law professor Jedediah Purdy in After Nature, although perhaps not quite the lesson we’d expect. As we now live in the “Anthropocene Age,” on a planet so marked by our boot print that we must “add nature itself to the list of things that are not natural,” there is a dangerous tendency to romanticize Thoreau and his cabin experiment in some Before-the-Fall fashion — a life not just “simple and true and natural” but now permanently and tragically impossible. In fact, says Purdy, pure nature was impossible for Thoreau, too, as he knew:
Thoreau tells us that the woods around the pond have been cleared, that boats have sunk to its bottom, that it is regularly harvested for ice. His Concord is full of the artifacts of old and new settlement, down to the soil itself, seeded with stone tools and potsherds that tinkle against the hoe as he works his bean-field. There is nothing pristine in this place, no basis for a fantasy of original and permanent nature.
Purdy’s book, in the Thoreauvian spirit, is a call to action at the most fundamental do-it-yourself level. With all paths now interconnected, the only way forward is by group compass:
Everyone living today is involved, intentionally or inadvertently, in deciding what to do with a complicated legacy of environmental imagination and practice, now that all simple ideas of nature are irretrievably gone. Losing nature need not mean losing the value of the living world, but it will mean engaging it differently . . . [T]his will require a vocabulary, an ethics, an aesthetics, and a politics, for a time when the meaning of nature is ultimately a human question.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29jl5Ey
Sig Nordal 