The Invention of Nature

IN SEPTEMBER 1847 Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond to move back home to the nearby town of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was thirty years old, and for the previous two years, two months and two days he had lived in a small hut in the woods. He had done so, he said, because he ‘wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life’.

Thoreau had built the shingled cabin with his own hands. Ten by fifteen feet, the small building had a window on each side and a fireplace with a small stove to heat the room. He had a bed, a small wooden desk and three chairs. When he sat on his doorstep he could see the gently rippling surface of the pond shimmering in the sun. The pond was ‘earth’s eye’, Thoreau said, which when it froze in winter ‘closes its eyelids’. It was a walk of just under two miles around the shoreline. The steep embankment was crowned with large white pines greened by their long tufts of needles, as well as hickories and oaks – like ‘slender eyelashes which fringe it’. In spring delicate flowers carpeted the forest floor and in May blueberries paraded their dangling bell-shaped blooms. Goldenrod brought their bright yellows to the summer and sumachs added their reds to the autumn. In winter, when snow muffled sound, Thoreau followed the tracks of rabbits and birds. In autumn, he rustled piles of fallen leaves with his feet to make as much noise as possible while singing loudly in the forest. He watched, he listened and he walked. He meandered through the gentle countryside around Walden Pond and became a discoverer, naming places as an explorer might: Mount Misery, Thrush Alley, Blue Heron Rock and so on.

Thoreau would turn these two years in his cabin into one of the most famous pieces of American nature writing: Walden, which he published in 1854, some seven years after his return to Concord. Thoreau found it difficult to write the book, and it only became Walden as we know it today when he discovered a new world in Humboldt’s Cosmos

. Humboldt’s view of nature gave Thoreau the confidence to weave together science and poetry. ‘Facts collected by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of truth,’ Thoreau later wrote. Walden was Thoreau’s answer to Cosmos.

Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond (Illustration Credit 19.1)

Thoreau was born in July 1817. His father was a tradesman and pencil maker, but struggled to make a living. Home was Concord, a bustling town of about 2,000 inhabitants, some fifteen miles west of Boston. Thoreau had been a shy boy who preferred to be alone. When his classmates played boisterous games, he would stand by the side with his eyes on the ground, always searching for a leaf or an insect. He was not popular because he never joined in and they called him the ‘fine scholar with a big nose’. Climbing trees like a squirrel, he felt most comfortable outdoors.

Aged sixteen Thoreau enrolled at Harvard University, only a little more than ten miles to the south-east of Concord. Here he studied Greek, Latin and modern languages including German as well as taking courses in maths, history and philosophy. He used the library intensely and particularly enjoyed travel accounts, dreaming himself away to distant countries.

After his graduation, in 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord where he worked briefly as a teacher as well as occasionally helping his father in the family pencil-making business. It was in Concord that Thoreau met the writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson who had moved there three years previously. Fourteen years his senior, Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write, as well as opening his well-stocked library to him.¹ It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that Thoreau built his little cabin. At that time Thoreau was grieving for his only brother, John, who had died in his arms after a tetanus infection. Thoreau had been so traumatized by John’s sudden death that he had even developed a ‘sympathetic’ form of the disease, experiencing similar symptoms such as lockjaw and muscle spasms. He felt like ‘a withered leaf’ – miserable, useless and so desolate that a friend had advised: ‘build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you.’

Nature helped Thoreau. A fading flower was no reason to mourn, he told Emerson, nor were thick layers of mouldering autumn leaves on the forest floor because in the following year all would spring back into life. Death was part of nature’s cycle and thus a sign of its health and vigour. ‘There can be no really black melan-choly to him who lives in the midst of nature,’ Thoreau said as he tried to make sense of the world around and within him by being in nature.