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Henry David Thoreau—American Philosopher and Naturalist

Henry David Thoreau, philosopher, poet, naturalist and champion of freedom, who died 100 years ago on May 6, 1962, is one of the most complex figures in American literature.

His friend and teacher, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, asked to preach his funeral sermon, said of him: "No truer American existed than Thoreau." His many biographers have since described him in various and conflicting ways, as "Happy Rebel," "American Diogenes", "Poet of Nature", "The Cosmic Yankee", "Philosopher of Freedom", "Nature Hermit", "Radical Individualist" and "Nature Lovers' Patron Saint". Eccentric, independent, and individualistic in his behaviour, he undoubtedly ranks among the outstanding men of letters which America has produced.

Thoreau wrote only two books that were published during his lifetime. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" sold only 300 copies. "Walden, or Life in the Woods" was a moderate success but in later years win international acceptance as a classic. Few American books have been translated into so many languages as this account of Thoreau's residence in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. It is still highly popular on American bookstands. His essay, "Civil Disobedience," later became the acknowledged inspiration to Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.

Thoreau was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town near Boston. He was the son of a pencil manufacturer who worked hard to support his wife and three children. At the age of 16 young Henry, soundly equipped in Latin, Greek, French and arithmetic went to Harvard University where he studied English, German and Italian literature and philosohpy.

During his four years at Harvard he urged the younger generation to strive courageously toward intellectual freedom as Emerson, the man who had the greatest influence on Thoreau's thinking, had preached. Already everything in nature absorbed him and he began filling notebooks with the observations of a careful eye.

After he left Harvard, he opened a private school with his brother John, lectured, and wrote for literary magazines. When John died, Thoreau lived for some time in Emerson's house, where he worked in the garden and met many Transcendentalists, a group of young philosophers who affirmed the importance of phenomena that transcend the experience of sense. Their influence never left him. But, always determined to keep a hold on freedom and independence and wanting a change from talk and theory, he looked around for a place where he would have full leisure to think, to study nature and to write.

In July 1845 he found the ideal place at Walden Pond, about a mile from Concord. He built a one-room cabin 10ft wide by 15ft long in a lonely spot. He lived there as a semi-hermit, studying nature and contemplating, until September, 1847. When a sparrow alighted on his shoulder he felt a greater thrill than if a king had decorated him, he wrote:

"I went to the woods," he writes in "Walden," "because I wanted to live deliberately to front only the essential fact of life. I wanted to live deep and suck out the marrow of life."

His cabin was a solitude, outwardly not an adventure, because the woods were not very wild and lie often received visitors, but it was a symbol. He put into practice a theory which could not be allowed to remain theory: Simplicity. He noted: "I wanted to live so Sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life." And later: "I learned this, at least by my experiment: that if one advanced confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

While living at Walden Pond he raised beans and potatoes, baked his own bread and becae a vegitarian, except for an occasional meal of Walden fish. His planting of food, his hunting and fishing, his plastering of his cabin were all experiments to prove that simplicity can be practiced if necessary, that civilised man can escape the evils of competition. The total cost of food for his stay was earned by his own labours—he sold his beans.

People have asked: What is so remarkable about having lived for two years in a small cabin by a lake? The answer is that few others have done it, and that Thoreau quite specifically knew how he wanted to live and what he wanted to live for. He was convinced that his experiment had universal significance.

The journals he kept during the two years, and later used in "Walden," are a record of mental growth of a man speaking sincerely about himself as he feels his way towards the truest assessment he can make of the world and his place in it. When he returned to Concord he was willing to preach the doctrine of simplification and oneness with nature without urging that the simplifying should be in the Walden mode.

In later years Thoreau gave lectures, wrote a number of essays, and worked as land surveyor. He never married. Among his friends was Walt Whitman, whom he met in 1856 in New York. He felt that Whitman, as much as himself, was finding his inspiration in pure and primeval sources and he appreciated the basic honesty of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." He also became increasingly involved in the anti-slavery movement.

In 1857 he met Captain John Brown, the abolitionist, and was profoundly stirred. The news of Brown's capture and trial after he had tried to liberate forcefully the slaves in northern Virginia, inspired Thoreau to write a "Plea for Captain John Brown." He was the first American to speak publicly in defence of Brown as a martyred champion of individual freedom, as a man of principle, victimised by an unjust state.

In November 1860, Thoreau caught cold. Tuberculosis developed and he died 18 months later, not yet 45 years old. Some of his deathbed marks became famous. To an old friend, concerned about his welfare in the life beyond the grave, he replied: 'My friend, one world at a time." To an aunt, who asked him whether he had made his peace with God, he replied, that he had never quarreled with Him. He left a huge mass of manuscripts. His sister and friends later publised 18 books based on his journals and letters.

What makes Thoreau outstanding among American men of letters are his major themes—his mysticism (he urged people to commune with the spirit of the universe), his sympathy with wildness in nature ("Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies at a man"), and his strong belief in practical individual rights.

The idea of freedom was not merely talk with him. He spent a night in jail rather than pay a tax which he felt was unjust. In "Civil Obedience" lie tried to imagine a state "which can afford to be just to all men," and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbour. As a Puritan iconoclast and stoic, he criticised society but was convinced that reform is possible only insofar as each man reforms himself. Man is, he believed, a maker rather than a victim of his own fate. He preached against conformity and said that "if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." When he attacked materialism, it was from the point of view of a mystic who had studied the Bhagavad-Gita, the early Hindu poem of philosophic import, besides which "even our Shakespeare seems sometimes youthfully green." As a reformer, he and Whitman were at the heart of the persistent American tradition of perfectibility.

When he advocated "simplicity" he believed that "money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul," that "our life is frittered away by details," that a "man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." But the "simplicity" which he recommends is a relative thing. It means only that every man should refuse to pay a price for what is not essential to him and that he should not sacrifice himself to get things which he does not really want.

His writings about nature are characterised by ecstacy of pantheism. He wrote: "We can never have enough of nature." As a lover of nature, he was also a lover of man.

Today, Thoreau is hailed as social philosopher, as essayist with the touch of a prophet, as the chosen spokesman for thousands who seek salvation of the soul through solitary communion with nature. But Thoreau the man was perhaps best described by Emerson 100 years ago: "His soul was made for the noblest society . . .Whereever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there,'s beauty, he will find a home."