Questions the Morning Answers

Some questions cannot be thought through to an answer; they can only be lived through. Thoreau wakes one morning at Walden with a question the night left in him and finds the dawn answering it, and Kaag knows that experience from the worst year of his life. That is half of The Pond in Winter. The other half is commerce: in the winter of eighteen forty-six, a hundred men came onto the frozen pond with ploughs and saws, cutting Walden into blocks to sell. The chapter holds the two postures side by side, a mirror that does not flatter, and Kaag will tell you plainly which man on the ice he is.