The Relevance Now of Thoreau’s Call to Keep it Simple—and Wild

By Neil King Jr.

Naturally, when the dictate came to self-isolate, more than a few of us thought of Thoreau. There he is, our national prophet of solitude, pottering among the beans in his garden and skinny-dipping in Walden Pond. Is that him cresting the hill in his sole pair of baggy pants, out on another of his rambles?

We’d be missing the best of the man if we thought his prime message to us now, in this odd epoch of bare necessity and self-reliance, was all about living alone. Yes, he was an evangelist for social distance. He knew how to keep his space. 

But his far deeper call, and the one that should echo loudest now, was for a radical simplicity and attentiveness. He died two years into the Civil War, and decades before the machine age made possible the mass production and mass consumption of everything. But he saw that consumerist tide coming, and urged with all his heart that we resist it.

Thoreau believed deeply that we have all the basic ingredients for happiness on hand already, like a well-stocked cupboard. Too many accoutrements—that fourth pair of shoes, the overly large house, the storage unit for all the garage can’t hold—subtract from our well-being.  He would perish at the sight of a single parking lot along I-95.

He was our greatest observer of the up close and ordinary, and sang mightily of the transcendence that comes from walking and looking and smelling and thinking. He kept things local—no travel ban needed—because he derived such extraordinary meaning and richness from all that lay within a hundred paces of his house. Thoreau traversed entire galaxies in his thought and writings, and his longest and last trip was to Minnesota. He never went overseas, and just once to Canada, and that was enough. 

He abhorred distraction, and the hubbub of cities, just as cities were to become the dominant domicile for most Americans. His talent for minute observation was religious in its intensity. Everywhere he went, he knew the names of things and from whence them came: trees, flowers, birds, insects, fish. Being inside that head, even for a minute, would buckle my knees, I have no doubt of that.

His first book—a marvel today but a commercial flop in 1849—describes his weeklong paddle on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. His embarkation point was barely a ten-minute stroll from his childhood home. Sheer delight prompted him to take the trip, he says. All that the Concord River contained— the “occasional logs and stems of trees,” the shining pebbles, the floating cranberries—“were objects of singular interest to me,” he wrote, “and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom, and float wither it would bear me.” In one golden page he describes every fish native to those rivers. 

Thoreau could be a scold, and judgmental to a fault. Reading Walden, you are amused and chastened and at times so smothered in life instruction that you need to step outside. He was a flinty Yank, but also a yogic mystic who championed the Now, above all. His prime ambition “in any weather, at any hour of the day or night” was “to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”

The coronavirus has turned many of us into denizens of the moment and solitary strollers. With little reason to drive, we walk, just to cover territory and think. We are finding our minds work better that way. The 19th century teemed with famous walkers—Wordsworth was another noted apostle—but Thoreau sang of its virtues perhaps the most fulsomely. 

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,” he writes in the opening to his often-hilarious essay, Walking. His promptings, as always, were extreme: “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.” How glorious, that line alone.

When Thoreau’s collected journal entries were published in 1907, reviewers were astonished at their sheer girth: 14 volumes in all and just shy of 7,000 pages. “What is it that warrants so full a publication of writings which in the author’s own time were so generally overlooked or contemned?” asked the reviewer that year in The Dial

“Two qualities especially,” the reviewer concluded: “Their wonderful variety of topic and treatment, and the charm of their style when at its best. Back of both those lies Thoreau’s chief quality—his power of exact and minute observation; and still further back and deeply original with him, the power of profound thought and comprehensive imagination applied to the most commonplace objects and events.”

It is tragically ironic, in our shut-in moment, that Thoreau’s longest trip was taken for his health. He was dying of consumption, what today we call tuberculosis, a bacterial infection of the lungs, and hoped the air of Minnesota would cure him. 

Despite his travails, he pushed himself to see what he could of the then-wild parts of the American Northwest, seeking both new wonders and cleaner air passages. “So much the more should we rise above our condition, and make the most of it, for the fruit of disease may be as good as that of health,” he wrote in his journal. He died seven months after his return to Concord, at just 42. 

Thoreau spawned a thousand famous dos and don’ts, but few have left a meaningful imprint on the American psyche or way of life. He was among the true greats and utter originals of American thought—up there with Franklin, Emerson, Whitman, Henry Adams, Baldwin—but we have heeded too little of what he, or they, really had to say. 

Maybe a few of us will now, with a little more time for walking.