[Lara Mangino]

So in class today (3/26), I brought up a point that Thoreau looks down on humanity in favor of nature but that humans are a part of nature. From that, it was brought up that we should explore whether Thoreau views humanity as a part of nature or separate from it. It reminded me of the first paragraph of “Walking”. In this paragraph, Thoreau seems to say that humans are a part of nature–“…man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature”–but that it is society that is opposed to it.

[Lara Mangino]

Schulz claims that Thoreau pretends that he is a loner in the middle of the woods when, in fact, he is not that isolated. However, he never says he wishes to be alone exactly; it is only public perception of him that makes him a true hermit. In the first paragraph of “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” he says that “the village was too far from [Walden],” showing that he does not want to cast off all his connections to the village. Additionally, in paragraph 10, he explicitly says how far he is from the village: “about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it,” which is about a half an hour walk.

[Lara Mangino]

Schulz makes many damning claims in her New Yorker opinion piece which derogatorily refers to Henry David Thoreau as “Pond Scum.” First, she calls him, simply put, an unlikable person. “The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world” (Schulz). He looked down on his peers, writing, “’Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,… it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded’” (Schulz). Purdy instead points out, on behalf of Laura Dassow Walls, that Thoreau was an outspoken abolitionist, feminist, and “was deeply interested in the indigenous cultures that remained in New England, seeking out conversation and even friendship with Native Americans, studying the Wampanoag language on his own while at Harvard, and filling more than 3,000 notebook pages with material from these investigations” (Purdy). He liked and admired his peers, especially the ones building a railroad near his beloved Walden Pond.

Additionally, Schulz believes him to be incredibly privileged and completely unaware of it. Purdy, of course, tries to denounce this, pointing out that he made a speech once where he said, “’The reason why Frederick Douglass is not here… is the reason why I am.’ If every privilege check had that kind of snapping specificity and quiet moral thunder, they might be both more subversive and less disdained” (Purdy). Thoreau may have been aware of his privilege as a white man, but privilege as it relates to race is not the only kind of privilege Thoreau clearly had. He chose to live a life many poor, starving, and unhappy people are forced into; however, unlike those poor, starving, and unhappy people, he can leave such a lifestyle at any time, essentially rubbing privilege in the face of those who don’t have it. “[H]e wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it” (Schulz). For comparison, Schulz brings up another writer who lived a similar lifestyle as Thoreau: Laura Ingalls Wilder. “[H]er books are not only more joyful and interesting than ‘Walden’ but also, when reread, a thousand times more harrowing. Real isolation presents real risks, both emotional and mortal, and, had Thoreau truly lived at a remove from other people, he might have valued them more” (Schulz).

Not only was Thoreau’s isolation fake because he could leave it at any time, but because he did not live the life he claimed to. Henry David Thoreau was a fraud. “Only someone who had never experienced true remoteness could mistake Walden for the wilderness or compare life on the bustling pond to that on the mid-nineteenth-century prairies” (Schulz). Not only was Walden Pond a frequented spot for picnickers and swimmers, but it was only a twenty-minute walk from Thoreau’s family home, where he would frequently venture to get cookies and conversations. He claimed he lived a life of solitude and simplicity—“’For the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England…. At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man’” (Schulz)—yet lived surrounded by people and trivialities. Purdy dismisses this point by claiming that Thoreau did remain an active member of society and his household, but that he needed “an initial declaration of independence from all entanglements to clear accounts” (Purdy). This, he claims, was Thoreau’s act of separating himself from society, only to rejoin it once he had “studied the landscape and wild things, studied his townsmen from a middle distance, and, through it all, studied himself” (Purdy).

It seems the largest discrepancy between Schulz’s view of Thoreau and Walls’s and Purdy’s view of Thoreau comes down to how Thoreau viewed himself, his isolation, and others. Did he really look down on his fellow man and woman? Did he really take advantage of a privilege given to him by fate, only to flirt with poverty, essentially spitting in the face of those who must truly live it? Did he really claim to live a life of complete isolation, or did he acknowledge that he lived closer to civilization than today’s perceptions think? These are all things to watch as we begin to read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

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