One Night in Jail

One afternoon Thoreau walked into Concord to collect a shoe from the cobbler and was arrested. Walden spends a single sentence on it, barely breaking stride, and that sentence carries his whole politics. Kaag follows where it leads: the tax he refused, the pressure one night in jail puts on the social contract, the line that runs from his cell to Gandhi and King. Then back to Visitors, and a quieter sentence still, about certain guests he helped toward the north star. He was years ahead of Emerson there. The episode ends on the hardest knot in his politics: a man of nonviolence, applauding a man of blood.