I first heard of this book years ago — by which I mean, walk into just about any bookstore and you’re likely to spot Walden on the shelf. Its name keeps circulating on the internet too, and the interest never seems to fade. It’s a classic, and the reason has much to do with the circumstances under which it was written. More on that later.
I had always assumed Walden was a novel. Only when I opened it recently did I discover it’s a work of fact, drawn entirely from the author’s own life. When I heard that Thoreau had spent two years living alone by a pond called Walden and written a book out of it, what I pictured was total seclusion — two years without a word to another human being. You see, this is the trouble with us: our imagination always reaches for the noblest version of things. True solitude is nearly impossible to pull off, and yet I held humanity to the most perfect fantasy and assumed Thoreau had genuinely cut himself off from the world. The truth is otherwise. Thoreau was only half a hermit: he walked into town now and then, and he walked out to the other ponds nearby.
Walden is a book that starts in the deep end and wades toward the shallows. Or perhaps the prose is equally dense from cover to cover, and I simply grew used to Thoreau’s way of telling a story and turning a phrase. Many people dislike this book for being obscure and difficult — and the difficulty lies in his observations and criticism of society, and in a narrative manner that runs too abstract. I’ve shared this view before: right at the opening of the first chapter, Thoreau puts his thorniest arguments on the table and lays straight into the fashions of his society. A closed-minded reader will usually hate this book, because the odds are they belong to the very crowd he’s criticizing — the people who only like books that go down easy. But reading shouldn’t stop at the books we like; we should also read the books that challenge us. It’s precisely the uncomfortable ones that test our values and make us more complete — otherwise, how is reading any different from scrolling TikTok? If we read the way we watch short videos, consuming only what pleases us, we only entrench our biases and make ourselves duller.
Thoreau wrote this book in mid-nineteenth-century America, when technology was changing by the day and new inventions kept pouring out. What he attacked was precisely this restlessness cut loose from the root of living. People laid down rails, but the passengers often had no idea where it was they were actually going; we could reach more places than ever, yet somehow we could no longer find where we truly belonged. He said much the same of the telegraph: the first piece of news Americans received over the wire, of all things, was that some famous figure across the ocean had fallen ill — which struck Thoreau as absurd. To be fair, he couldn’t condemn it all wholesale; technological progress genuinely did add to society’s overall welfare. And in the later parts of the book, Thoreau returns to the railroad again and again — its punctuality made it one of the ways he told time. Progress delivers plenty of results you can see with your own eyes, yet people grow less and less happy; to some degree, progress has actually deepened our suffering. The internet age has no shortage of choices, but exposed to endless information and endless options, we often can’t tell which choice is the right one. If Thoreau were alive today, he would probably recognize the hell he had once only imagined. If the spirit does not rise, no advance in technology will do any good.
So what is the antidote to this restlessness? Thoreau is perfectly clear: return to the essentials of life — subtract. And subtraction isn’t just for the clutter around the house; clothing, diet, even the house itself can be pared down. The modern closet holds far too many clothes: anyone who can’t decide what to wear within a minute of heading out the door is probably living a life full of small torments. If a person’s meals are drenched in oil, salt, and sugar, their body won’t be healthy either. People love to plead the shallow thrill of the taste buds in defense of eating junk. Look at the wild animals: their choices of food are few — no seasonings to choose from at all — yet they rarely have health problems. It’s not as though the local wildlife would fall apart if a city failed to open a veterinary clinic.
The other way back is to touch nature itself. Nature is the theme that runs through the whole of Walden. We are children of nature, not children of concrete. We belong back on the grass, back among the mountains and rivers — not locked away in four-cornered cells of poured concrete. Go listen to the birds. Watch the clouds drift. Feel the breeze against your face. Feel the gale and the downpour too, because that wildness in nature is every bit as magnificent, and it stirs the heart. The sounds of nature are beautiful in their own right; they are where human inspiration comes from.
Finally — at the risk of punching above my weight — a word on the writing itself. I think Thoreau overworks his rhetoric: too many metaphors make a sentence more abstract, harder still to follow. Perhaps the era explains it. Thoreau wanted so badly to forge a literature that America could call its own, to push its distinctiveness to the very limit. His book reads unevenly because a single long passage carries too many things folded into it, and this leaves me with a particular frustration: by the time I finish a section, I’ve often forgotten what came before. But then again, that is individuality — a notion much exalted in his day.
Nature is magnificent, and no one person may over-describe that magnificence without distorting it. What the real Walden Pond makes you feel, no amount of writing can genuinely carry across. We have to do it ourselves: step out the door, touch the natural world, and with the heart rather than the intellect, feel the most magnificent presence in the universe.
The ideas gathered in this book are beyond counting. It is not only a work of literature; it is a diary of living, and a book of philosophy and self-examination. It covers more ground than I could possibly digest — let alone turn back on myself — in a matter of days. This is a book to be read again and again.
In the end, it comes down to this: the simpler you live, the happier your life.
Beijing