with commentary by John Kaag
Henry David Thoreau gives his own answer in the book: he went to the woods to live deliberately — to interrupt what he saw as the self-imposed penance of ordinary work, to test how much of what we call necessity is really assumption, and to find out, before he died, whether he had actually lived. But John Kaag, reading Walden across a lifetime, hears a more urgent question underneath that famous one. Not why did Thoreau go, but why do any of us keep needing to. And his answer to that question begins, startlingly, with his own heart stopping.
The Fear Walden Is Built to Address
Kaag had a cardiac arrest at forty, on a treadmill at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. "When I died for two minutes before the EMTs brought me back with their little defibrillator," he says, "when I was brought back, I immediately thought to myself: I am so lucky, because I get a chance to try again at this thing called life." Most people who die do not come back. And the lesson he took from coming back is the lesson he thinks Thoreau is teaching. "The scariest part of death isn't the dying part," Kaag says. "It's rather the looking back and realizing that you haven't lived in the appropriate way, in a way that you could actually endorse." That is the fear Walden is built to address. Thoreau went to the pond, in this reading, so that he would not arrive at the end and discover he had never lived.
Penance, and Lives of Quiet Desperation
What were people doing instead of living? Thoreau had a word for it, and Kaag spends real time on it: penance. Thoreau wrote that the inhabitants of Concord appeared to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. Kaag translates the term into the present. "Penance is the type of job or labor that you do in order to make you feel like you're okay with the world again," he says, and modern penance "has very little to do with religion, but it has everything to do with the sacred cows that we worship in modern society, the worship of money, the worship of fame, the worship of progress, the worship of security and fixity." The penance is the cycle: working to pay for the house, to pay for the gas, to get to the work, to pay for more gas. Kaag does not exempt himself. "Have you ever done penance? Hell, yes, I've done penance. And it's been mean." He traces it, with painful specificity, to the same place his cardiac arrest came from. The grandfather and mother on his shoulder telling him he never had enough, he says, "made me work like an actual banshee for years and years. It drove me to the point where I had cardiac arrest when I was 40 years old. That's a lot of penance."
This is why Kaag keeps returning to Walden, and he names the reason plainly. The book exists, for him, to deliver one correction: "you are more than your stuff." That sounds like a slogan until you set it against the cycle it is meant to break. Thoreau's most famous diagnosis, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, is not a poetic flourish in Kaag's reading. It is a clinical description of people running faster and faster to justify lives they never chose. Kaag connects it to a destitute man Thoreau met on a New Hampshire road in 1839, a man traveling thirty miles a day to nowhere, whom Thoreau concluded was "endeavoring to escape from himself." Thoreau, Kaag says, "would like us to avoid living lives that are crimes, that we feel as if we have to escape ourselves."
Necessity Is Mostly Assumption
So the going to the pond is, at bottom, a way of stopping. But stopping to do what? Here Kaag introduces the idea that gives the whole book its leverage: most of what we call necessity is assumption. Thoreau says men labor under a mistake, and Kaag is precise about what the mistake is. "To live under a mistake is simply the process of thinking that you need certain things in life and then discovering that in fact you don't." His example is Thoreau's own: the farmer convinced he cannot live without meat, hauled along by an ox that has lived on vegetable matter its whole life. "We act like we have to live in a million dollar house, but in fact we don't have to do that," Kaag says. To operate under a mistake is to live out assumptions that are simply false, and never to test them.
Testing them is the experiment: Thoreau goes to Walden to find out what is actually necessary, and Kaag lists the irreducible answer Thoreau arrives at: shelter, clothing, food, and what Thoreau calls vital heat. Everything past that is, at least provisionally, optional. The cabin is less a vow of poverty than a laboratory for distinguishing the luxuries we mistake for needs from the few things a human being genuinely requires. Kaag is careful to note that Thoreau draws a line around who this lesson is for. Thoreau says he is not speaking to those with strong and valiant natures who have already found their way, and Kaag adds that Thoreau is also careful "not to judge the lives of those individuals who are actually oppressed," who in his day were suffering through slavery. The sermon is aimed at the discontented who could change their lot and do not.
That is finally why Thoreau went to Walden Pond, in Kaag's reading, and why the book outlasts its century. He went to interrupt the self-imposed penance of modern life, to test the assumptions, to find out before dying whether he had lived. The pond was the place to ask the question, but the question is portable. Kaag carries it out of the woods and into a hospital recovery, a failed marriage, a near-fatal habit of overwork, and finds Thoreau waiting there too, with the same stubborn reminder that the life you are doing penance for may not be a life you ever actually chose. Going to Walden was never really about the pond. It was about getting far enough from the noise to hear the question at all.