The Invention of Nature

Nature, Hawthorne said, ‘seems to adopt him as her especial child’, for animals and plants communicated with him. There was a bond that no one could explain. Mice would run across Thoreau’s arms, crows would perch on him, snakes coiled around his legs and he always found even the most hidden first blossoms of spring. Nature spoke to him, and Thoreau to it. When he planted a field of beans, he asked, ‘What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?’ The joy of his daily life was ‘a little star-dust caught’, he said, or a ‘segment of a rainbow which I have clutched’.

Henry David Thoreau (Illustration Credit 19.3)

During his time at Walden Pond, Thoreau watched nature closely. He bathed in the morning and then sat in the sun. He walked through the woods or quietly crouched in a clearing, waiting for the animals to parade themselves for him. He observed the weather and called himself a ‘self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms’. In summer he took his boat out and played the flute while drifting on the water, and in winter he sprawled out flat on the frozen surface of the pond, pressing his face against the ice to study the bottom ‘like a picture behind a glass’. At night he listened to the tree branches rubbing against the shingles of his cabin’s roof, and in the morning to the birds that serenaded him. He was ‘a wood-nymph’, as one friend said, ‘a sylvan soul’.

For all his enjoyment of solitude, Thoreau did not live like a hermit in his cabin. He often went to the village to have meals with his family at his parents’ house or with the Emersons. He delivered lectures at the Concord Lyceum and received visitors at Walden Pond. In August 1846 the Concord anti-slavery society held their annual meeting on the doorsteps of Thoreau’s cabin and he went on an excursion to Maine. But he also wrote. During his two years at Walden Pond, Thoreau filled two thick notebooks, one with his experiences in the woods (the notes that would become the first version of Walden) and another containing a draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

, a book about a boat trip he had taken with his much missed brother some years earlier.

When he moved out of his cabin and returned to Concord, he tried and repeatedly failed to find a publisher for A Week. No one was interested in a manuscript that was part nature description, and part memoir. In the end, one publisher agreed to print and distribute it at Thoreau’s own expense. It was a resounding commercial failure. No one wanted to buy the book and many of the reviews were scathing, with one, for example, accusing Thoreau of copying Emerson badly. Only a few admired it, declaring it a book that was ‘purely American’.

The enterprise left Thoreau several hundred dollars in debt and with many unsold copies of A Week

. He now owned a library of 900 books, he quipped, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself’. The unsuccessful publication also provoked friction between Thoreau and Emerson. Thoreau felt let down by his old mentor who had praised A Week despite not liking it. ‘While my friend was my friend he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him, but when he became my enemy he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow,’ Thoreau wrote in his journal. It probably didn’t help their friendship either that Thoreau had developed a crush on Emerson’s wife, Lydian.

Today Thoreau is one of the most widely read and beloved American writers – during his lifetime, though, his friends and family worried about his lack of ambition. Emerson called him the ‘only man of leisure’ in Concord and one who was ‘insignificant here in town’, while Thoreau’s aunt believed that her nephew should be doing something better ‘than walking off every now and then’. Thoreau never cared much what others thought. Instead, he was struggling with his Walden manuscript, finding it hard to finish. ‘What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing?’ he wrote in his journal, concluding that ‘I must know a little more.’