Questioning Solitude

John Kaag takes the paired chapters "Solitude" and "Visitors" in Henry David Thoreau's Walden as a single challenge: can you be alone with yourself, and what do you make of other people when they turn up? He sets Thoreau in the European Romantic tradition, where a solitary, unmediated encounter with nature is how a person catches sight of the true self and gets a sense of God, and he promises something of his own experience of being alone.

Then he defends Thoreau against the misanthrope charge: the hut had plenty of visitors, and Thoreau judged them. The one to watch is the Canadian woodcutter, naive and largely uneducated, whom Thoreau may have respected or, Kaag suggests, revered. Maybe being educated isn't what it's cracked up to be. Kaag ends on the runaway who had been enslaved, whom Thoreau helped, and reads that as what Thoreau wanted for every visitor, you included: to be a little more free.