Wyman, Quoil, and What Masks

Walk the woods around Walden Pond in winter and you will step over cellar holes: a potter named Wyman lived in one, an Irish ditcher named Hugh Quoil in another, and most of them drank. Thoreau records the ruin without flinching, and the question underneath his record is whose failure it was, theirs or the country's. Kaag has skin in that question. He has reached for the bottle himself, and he watched his father die of it, so he reads these pages more personally than most. Then winter arrives in earnest, and Thoreau makes it last two chapters on purpose. Slowing down is something you have to feel.