with commentary by John Kaag
When I was 23, I moved to the Boston-Cambridge area to figure out whether I was going to become a writer. I'd left my college home in Los Angeles and retreated into life as a bookseller while I decided: if and how I wanted to move forward, if and how I wanted to write, what my place in the world might be. I'd read Walden (1854) as a student. And in my mind, Henry David Thoreau hadn't just gone into the woods outside Boston. He'd gone to another world, another universe, somewhere so separated and distinct that the book might as well have been sent back from it. Then one day I understood where Walden Pond actually is. Concord sits about seventeen miles from Boston. The commuter rail out of North Station stops there, running the same Boston-to-Fitchburg line Thoreau watched Irish laborers build past his cabin, the railroad he had in mind when he wrote that "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." The most famous retreat in American literature is a day trip.
That nearness rearranged something in me. It rearranged my picture of Thoreau, then of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the transcendentalists, of the whole shelf of philosophical and literary giants I'd been reading as if they broadcast from another dimension. These people were people. They wrote their books on real paper, in real places, and I could go to those places, and maybe, to some degree, I could be those people. I was entering the world for the first time as an adult, deciding what kind of adult to be, and here was the evidence that the writers I revered had stood on ordinary ground while they did the extraordinary thing. Looking back, the parallels between that year apart and Thoreau's two years at the pond are obvious in ways I didn't understand in the moment. At the time I only knew that the distance between my life and the life I wanted had suddenly gotten shorter. Seventeen miles, give or take.
John Kaag, my co-editor at Rebind, made the same discovery earlier and more decisively than I did. John has written most of these introductions himself; he can't very well write his own. So let me tell you what happens in his Rebind commentary on Walden, which I've now spent months inside, editing his recorded commentary into the audio series you're about to hear. It opens with a Latin teacher named Mr. Eames, who rescued a fourteen-year-old Kaag from central Pennsylvania by introducing him to the American transcendentalists and then taking him to Concord. They walked around the pond, and by the time they got around, the teenager made a declaration: "Mr. Eames, I'm gonna become a philosopher and I'm gonna write about Thoreau and I'm gonna live in Concord and teach philosophy." Mr. Eames chuckled at him and said, "Over your mother's dead body." Kaag records the ending himself, with evident pleasure: his mother is happy he turned into a Thoreauvian philosopher, and "I live in Concord about a mile and a half from Walden Pond, so dreams can come true." The vow held. The distance closed to a mile and a half.
What makes his commentary unlike any reading of Walden I've encountered is that Kaag never treats the book as a monument to explicate. He treats it as a set of claims to be tested, and the instrument he tests them on is his own life. When he reaches the most quoted sentence in the book, the one about living deliberately so as not to discover, at the end, that you had not lived, he tells you what it means to read that line after a cardiac arrest at forty stopped his heart for two minutes: "I get a chance to try again at this thing called life." When he reaches the chapter on the pond itself, he describes swimming across it six weeks after bypass surgery, in April water cold enough to terrify him, because "nature will really tell you who you are." When he reaches the autumn chapters, he tells you, frankly, that his mother has been in hospice for five and a half months, and that watching her pass is teaching him what Thoreau meant about the beauty of things that end. Episode by episode, the commentary becomes a double exposure: Thoreau's two years at the pond laid over one philosopher's forty years of trying to live by them.
The spine of his reading is a sentence the Thoreau biographer Robert Richardson once said to him, and which he passes on to us in the first episode:
"Walden is not simply Thoreau's escape, but his attempt to return to what it is to be human in the most general and universal sense, in a new way." — John Kaag, quoting Robert Richardson
An escape runs away from something; a return runs toward it. Thoreau moved to the pond on July 4, 1845, and Kaag insists the date is the whole question: "are we really free? Can we make ourselves more emancipated, more redemptive, more human and free if we think about the matter of living a little bit differently?" He reads Thoreau as an ancient cynic in American clothes, kin to Diogenes in his barrel, convinced that we're most human at a small remove from our institutions and conventions. A small remove. That's the part I keep turning over. Thoreau built his cabin a mile from town, on his friend Emerson's woodlot, within earshot of the railroad, and walked into Concord constantly. This was never a wilderness story. The experiment asked whether transformation could happen in sight of your own town, on borrowed land, seventeen miles from the city. Whether the other universe I'd imagined at 23 was, in fact, local.
I went on to graduate school for poetry, and my professor made sure we all read Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, because he believed they were fundamental to understanding what it means to be in the moment, to be in a poem, to be of a poem. What I've learned since is that I wasn't being taught how to write a poem. Or I was, obviously. But the real curriculum, the "translatable skill," as the humanities must call it in a world that asks poetry to justify itself to a spreadsheet, was how to live and be a person. That's not the most translatable skill for producing the spreadsheet. It's the skill that lets you show up tomorrow and work on the spreadsheet again. Kaag's episodes on attention make the same case through Thoreau's own vocabulary: the point of the experiment, Thoreau says, was "to improve the nick of time," and Kaag hears in that phrase the razor nick that killed Thoreau's brother John, who died in Henry's arms in 1842, three years before the move to the pond. The nick of time is the present, and it's also the wound. Attention is the whole game, because "there are no do-overs." When it's over, it's over.
Then comes the jump every reader of Walden eventually faces: what happened to all that? I finished graduate school, published a book, and pinballed through the next two decades in a way that felt continuous and propulsive, one thing caroming into the next. Somewhere in there the transcendentalists settled back into being an idea I'd once had. And then, this past year, they returned by an unexpected door: I began practicing transcendental meditation (the adjective is not lost on me), sitting twice a day, every day, for nearly a year now. Twenty years ago I thought about these writers; I thought of my own writing as being in communication and communion with them; I thought of myself as someone who might add to their space of ideas. But it was all thinking. It took two decades for the thing itself to arrive in the body, in the chair, in the twice-daily fact of sitting still. Thoreau went to the pond to practice, not to theorize. I understand that now in a way I couldn't have at 23, and Kaag's commentary is the reason the understanding finally landed.
I'll tell you the episode that undid me. It's called "Burnt Woods." On April 30, 1844, a year before the move to the pond, Thoreau's campfire got loose and burned three hundred acres of the Concord woods he loved, within sight of the pond where he'd later build his hut. The local paper said he had been "thoughtless, in other words, not very deliberate, which was 100% true," as Kaag puts it. The town called him Burnt Woods for years. Kaag reads the reverence for fire in Walden as atonement: "Fire is that which both destroys, but also gives life," and when Thoreau writes that in every fire one sees a face, the face in his first Walden fire is his own. I edited that episode as a fire survivor. In January 2025 the Eaton Fire tore through our town; our house stood but was made unlivable, and nearly everything we owned, including every book I'd ever shelved, was lost. I know something about the face in the fire, and about speaking lovingly of what burned. So when Kaag arrives at the lesson of the autumn chapters, I sat with it a long time:
"The task of life, at least to a large extent, is to realize that the meaning of things and the significance of things has very little to do with the permanence of things." — John Kaag
The series ends where Thoreau ends, with the command Kaag traces forward to Friedrich Nietzsche's amor fati: do not hate your life, love even its mean parts, because getting to the end able to endorse the whole of it is the only closure on offer. And with the image of the bug that sleeps sixty years in an apple-tree table before gnawing its way out: Thoreau's wager, in Kaag's words, "that we can be so much more than we are, that the universe is so much stranger and so much more beautiful than we typically regard it to be." Editing these thirty episodes, I wasn't only doing the work of doing work. I was spending nearly as much time on myself. That's what this commentary does. It hands you the book the way Mr. Eames handed it to a fourteen-year-old: as a live instruction, from a real person, about a real place you can actually reach.
I used to think Thoreau went to another universe. He went seventeen miles. Twice a day now, I close my eyes and make the trip. It's closer than you think.