A philosopher for our time

“Walden,” E.B. White once said, is “an oddity in American letters,” and perhaps it is its unparalleled singularity of voice and perspective that accounts for the intensely personal relationships that most readers form with the book. No other American classic, not even “Leaves of Grass,” instills such a strong conviction that it was written personally and individually for us. The effect is especially powerful when encountered in youth, when the reader is chafing at what is presented as accepted prospects for life. To the adult’s pronouncement, “You cannot,” it replies, with sublime equanimity, “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.” Thoreau appeals to the ageless adolescent in all of us, and “Walden” is an intoxicating blueprint for making one’s life interesting, uncommon, joyful and significant.

The corollary of such a personal relationship to a book is, of course, that this relationship changes as the reader ages and experiences the implacable limitations of actual life. To continue to embrace its shimmering ideals and optimism in the face of the prosaic accomplishments of one’s own life can become too painful. In self-defense, we distance ourselves from it. From a bracing guide to one’s own life, we may come to regard it as self-indulgent, smug, self-righteous and even hypocritical; or, more generously, as a masterful literary performance and subject for scholarly study; or, perhaps most dismissively, with fond forgiveness, like some distant and immature love affair.

So, having not read the book straight through for at least two decades (while nevertheless having continued to steal from it shamelessly in my own writing), I picked up Jeffrey Cramer’s edition of “Walden,” issued this year on the book’s 150th anniversary, one of several new editions, including an illustrated one from Houghton Mifflin and the Walden Woods Project. I did so with mixed expectations and a certain wariness. What would, or could, such an intensely glossed version of this youthful passion add to my experience of it?

Cramer, the curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute, has produced an annotated, not a critical, edition, and his notes are informative rather than interpretive. He respects both the text’s integrity and that of the reader to draw his own fundamental understanding of Thoreau’s words. He adopts the format of previous annotated editions -- notably Philip Van Doren Stern’s still unsurpassed “The Annotated Walden” and Walter Harding’s “Walden: An Annotated Edition” -- placing his abundant notations in the wide margins beside the text. Cramer’s marginal notes are even more thorough than those in the earlier editions (though they lack Stern’s copious maps, portraits, photographs and manuscript pages and Harding’s selection of sketches from Thoreau’s journals), so much so, however, that at times they threaten to crowd Thoreau’s words completely off the page, and often they are not on the same page as the text they refer to.

Most of the notes identify and elaborate on the abundance of literary, historical, religious, biological, geographical and other references in the text, ranging from the Bhagavad Gita to the headlines of Boston newspapers. As such, they serve to illustrate (if one did not already know) how widely read Thoreau was, despite his pride in having only a “short shelf” of books in his Walden hut and his disdain for local libraries.

More intriguing are the facts and sources behind some of “Walden’s” best-known passages. For instance, when Thoreau tells his famous parable of “the artist of Karoo” whose goal was to craft a perfect staff with no regard to time, he says that “ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times.” Cramer heightens the radical dimension of this tale when he notes that “in Hinduism and Buddhism

The notes also impress us with “Walden’s” wealth of references to and metaphorical uses of the world of business and commerce, giving it a richness it otherwise would not have. Despite his disdain for what passed (and passes) for progress and enterprise in this country, Thoreau had a deep and detailed understanding of agriculture, finance, transportation and industry. “Walden” may satirize the common methods of earning a living, and Thoreau may have striven to withhold his own time and effort from the mean world of getting and spending, but he never withheld his mind and he often gives his sympathy. “What recommends commerce to me,” he says, “is its enterprise and bravery.... I am less affected by the heroism of those who stood up for half an hour in the front line at [the Battle of] Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters.”

Any reader of “Walden” knows that Thoreau, like Shakespeare, was an inveterate punster, and Cramer takes pains to identify and explain every obvious and even every possible one. In this case, the loss seems greater than the gain, for few things are so dead as an explained pun. On the other hand, the notes point out that Thoreau shared a less-obvious Shakespearean trait, namely, a penchant for scatological humor.

In one of several examples, Thoreau makes the seemingly whimsical claim, “I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry, and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.” Its literal meaning becomes comically clear when Cramer informs us this is a reference “to urinating in the woods.”

Many of the marginal passages are taken from Thoreau’s vast 2-million-word journal. Juxtaposed with the text, we see that not only was the journal the source of many of the most famous passages, portraits and pronouncements in “Walden,” but that it often contained more interesting, elaborate and candid versions, which Thoreau condensed for reasons of literary economy, personal reserve or enigmatic effect. In his “Conclusion,” for example, Thoreau offers this sly “explanation” for leaving Walden after his two-year sojourn: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it was that I had more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for this one.” Compare this with the 1852 journal passage reflecting on his leaving:

“But why I changed? Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I ever came to go there. Perhaps it is none of my business, even if it is yours. Perhaps I wanted a change. There was a little stagnation, it may be.... Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there forever. One would think twice before he accepted heaven on such terms.”

Such journal versions of the “Walden” text reveal a much less confident but more complex, contradictory, subtle and appealingly human Thoreau than the resident of Walden whose announced purpose was “to brag as lustily as chanticleer ... if only to wake my neighbors up.”

What we come to understand from many of the annotated passages is that Thoreau made a distinction between the ideal conception of his life and the always-somewhat-disappointing actuality of his day-to-day existence, a distinction he admits candidly and forcefully in an 1856 letter to Calvin Greene: “You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally -- the stuttering, blundering, clodhopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense infinite brag & exaggeration.”

If “Walden” is intended to represent transcendent, poetic Reality, then the journal is, in large part, an admission of quotidian, factual Actuality, confessing the doubts, failures, depression and triviality of mind that “Walden” meticulously excludes. It is the mud from which “Walden’s” song rises pure and clear. And this too, it seems, is a source of the book’s enduring appeal, for which of us does not believe that we are better, at heart, than we are perceived to be or than the facts of our daily behavior would indicate?

Finally, the meticulous and often fascinating annotations in this edition are eclipsed -- as I am sure Cramer would want them to be -- by a rediscovery of the power and relevance of Thoreau’s language and insights, insights that not only seem to contain eternal verities of human nature but perhaps even more strikingly continue to have almost prescient relevance to our current cultural and political situations. Here is Thoreau, reflecting on the “American dream” of John Field, an Irish immigrant railroad laborer:

“[He] had rated it as a gain in coming to America that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavour to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”

When one encounters such passages (and “Walden” is studded with them, like New England puddingstone), one has the eerie sense that Thoreau has been reading our headlines. It is the paradox of “Walden,” and of all great literature that seeks to represent the real world, that by rooting his narrative so firmly in actualities of his own time and place, Thoreau created a work that remains vitally relevant to our own. *