The Wilds

John Kaag follows Henry David Thoreau's Walden into winter through "Former Inhabitants," "Winter Animals" and "The Pond in Winter." The first has always caught him in the throat. Thoreau's neighbors in Walden Woods were formerly enslaved people and poor Irish workers, and he was one of very few writers of his time to live among them and write them down. Kaag wants to know what Zilpah White and Brister Freeman mean to Thoreau, and why Hugh Quoil the ditcher is mentioned at all.

The hares are fragile and free, and Kaag wonders why we, who look so healthy, never exert ourselves. Then comes the sounding of the pond: are nature's mysteries bottomless or measurable, and what does Thoreau mean by "no less true of ethics"? The surprise is the ice cutters. Kaag sees Thoreau spotting the Anthropocene, where nature is never again purely wild and humans never again purely civilized. The questions have gotten harder, he says, and that is what close reading is for.