An Introduction to Walden

John Kaag opens Henry David Thoreau's Walden with his own story: a Latin teacher handed him the book at 14 and drove him to the pond, and he now lives a stone's throw from it. Then he sets Thoreau in his moment. Born in Concord in 1817, the year after New England's year without a summer, Thoreau left Harvard in 1837 as a panic wiped out a third of the country's disposable income, with the mills of Lowell and Lawrence rising in his backyard.

The turn is the book's afterlife. It sold 2,000 copies at a dollar apiece in its first five years; a first edition now goes for $12,000, and Kaag traces the line from the pond to Leopold, Dillard, King and Gandhi. He also gives you the sorting principle for "Economy" in one blunt word, and asks whether you actually need the watch, the clothes or the sofa. You leave knowing what Thoreau means by necessaries and why he's so hard on everything else.

Transcript

Hi there, I'm John Kaag. I'm the Donahue Professor of Ethics and the Arts at UMass Lowell, where I've taught American Transcendentalism and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau for more than 15 years. Thoreau's Walden is by far my favorite book to teach, and I'm very excited to introduce it to you or help you get reacquainted with it.

On this new reading platform, we often think about rebinding a book as a way to protect it, like closing something up very tight in a vault. But I like to think about it as a way of preserving words, thoughts, and insights in order to pass them on to a future that desperately needs them, a future like ours. Rebind is not about closing up old books for conservation, but opening them up for you. That is what Rebind is about, about giving you the chance to dive deeply into a book that might have puzzled you, attracted you, or even frightened you away. You won't be frightened at the end of reading this rebound copy of Walden.

Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about myself, why I got into philosophy and how I came to love Walden. I came from a rather unphilosophical family. My single parent mother was worried that her two sons wouldn't have enough money to live, so she encouraged us to study hard and become one of two things, doctors or lawyers. Those were the options. Even as a kid, I felt the pressure as overbearing and pushing me off course, but my Latin teacher gave me Walden at the age of 14 and took me to Massachusetts to walk around the pond where Henry David Thoreau began to write the book in 1845. And at the end of this trip to Massachusetts, I told my teacher that I wanted to become not a doctor or a lawyer, but a philosopher, and live at Walden Pond and teach Thoreau. I don't live at Walden Pond today, but just basically a stone's throw away. And I teach philosophy and I teach about Thoreau. And this dream became something of a reality, and the boldness to make personal dreams into a new life, well, that's the stuff of Thoreau's Walden, the most inspiring book I have ever read, and what the poet Robert Frost called America's greatest classic.

So who is Henry David Thoreau, and why did he come to Walden Pond in 1845? Thoreau, who is regarded as one of the founders of American Transcendentalism, was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. It was not a particularly auspicious time to be born. The year before, in 1816, had been New England's year without a summer, a year when it snowed in June and poverty swept through the northeast United States. Thoreau was born into a middle class family, but I have to say the times were tough. He grew up working with his hands, helping his father and mother put food on the table. He attended Harvard and did reasonably well, although he was far from being a rock star, and graduated in 1837.

Now again, 1837 marked another crisis for Thoreau as a young man and for his young nation: an economic panic wiped out one third of the country's disposable income. And young Henry was out of a job, and he thought to himself, oh my God, what am I supposed to do? Thoreau wanted to be a poet, or at least a writer, but all around him, people were scrambling to make ends meet any way they could. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and factories and mills, some of the biggest in the world, sprung up in Thoreau's backyard in towns like Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. But in the years that led up to his Walden experiment, Thoreau became more and more suspicious about the way that modern industrial life compromised the meaning and value of being human.

And here is where Transcendentalism comes in. Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had spearheaded a movement, basically at the very point that Thoreau left college, that stood in marked contrast, and as a protest, to the deadening forces of our contemporary age, its demands for conformity, for lockstep adherence to the rules. And we see these themes sifting through the first chapter of Walden, entitled "Economy." Let me give you a nutshell of Emerson's Transcendentalism, just for some additional context for the book. Emerson argued that the most important thing, the most important thing in human life, is getting in time, in sync, with the order and rhythm of nature. Society, far from encouraging our moral and spiritual development, encourages each of us to forget who we are most essentially, and masks our vital relationship to the natural world. Emerson and Thoreau wanted to provide a reminder to individuals like you and like me. He said: settle down, simplify your life. Live deliberately with nature and support yourself. Be self-reliant. Find yourself and God in the natural order of things.

This is what Thoreau is after in deciding to build a small hut on the shores of Walden Pond, beginning on July 4th, 1845. Walden, this American classic, is a careful account of his two year, two month, and two day experiment in simple living. Thoreau's description of life at the pond urges us to find our own Independence Day, our own place in nature where we can be spiritually and morally free. It's not enough to realize political freedom as they did in the American Revolution, but one had to find that most personal liberty in realizing an authentic, original and creative life. But first, Thoreau says, we need to get very clear about what is really necessary in our flourishing, and not confuse these, he will call them necessaries, with unnecessary, let me just say it, bullshit, which clutters most of our lives in the modern industrial West. Let's get real, says Thoreau. Do you really need your expensive watch, your flashy clothes or your designer sofa? You probably don't need a whole bunch of luxuries. And instead of making your life better, they tend to produce the opposite effect. They distract us from what is real and significant about human life: that, honestly, life is preciously short, and there is no time to waste in making a profound connection to nature and to each other. We have preciously little time to plumb the depths of ourselves.

I have to be clear about this. This message was slow in catching on in Thoreau's life. Walden sold very few copies in the first five years after publication. Only 2,000 copies were sold, at a very small sum, just a dollar. But if you wanna buy a first edition copy of Walden today, it goes for $12,000. Why? Because in the 20th century, Walden became the keystone of American environmentalism, inspiring Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Bill McKibben. Its message of non-conformity and civil disobedience set the stage for the work of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, and it sold millions upon millions of copies.

So let's talk a little more about this Rebind of Walden. How does this work? So you'll read through the original, or you can read the transformation, your choice, and you'll come across videos like this one that set the context for the coming sections. And you can watch them or not, your choice. And you can ask questions and mark sections as you like. Again, your choice. And you can engage in the tutorials that I've developed. Not your choice. I'm just joking. It is your choice. But I would strongly encourage you to check them out. They're chock-full of questions that I would like to ask you as if you were sitting side by side with me reading the book together. I'd like you to try to answer them as honestly and thoroughly as possible, because those types of answers will let the tutorial really speak to you in more detailed and meaningful ways. And that is the goal here, a type of interaction and connection to the text that you might not be able to have on your own. Good luck with this first chapter of Walden, and I'll see you in a bit.