“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.”
Walden: Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau, 1854
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Given the lines about nature and self-sufficiency which are often quoted from Walden I assumed Thoreau was a John Muir like figure, a poetic hermit who set out alone into the wilderness, an ethereal Naiad of the lakes. There are certainly out-of-context passages which suggest he was a wild-eyed naturalist.
What Thoreau ACTUALLY did was far less impressive. He built his shack on someone else’s land right outside Concord close enough to walk into town whenever he liked, which he frequently did in order to pass judgement on anyone foolish enough to hold a job or do any actual work. He brags about how many visitors he had in his shack while he simultaneously pours contempt on them for doing so. He comes off as a curmudgeon, a self-focused Ebenezer Scrooge who goes on long diatribes against society, whatever shape it takes. The only things he seems to take joy in are the Greek Epics, Hindu mythology, and the nature (flora, fauna, weather, and changing seasons) of Walden Pond. His descriptions of those things are delightful.
He was a Jeremiah-like figure, a prophet foretelling the doom of society, staying just close enough to the folks he was condemning to get on everyone’s nerves. He was like Christopher McCandless — a guy who burned his credit card and drivers license to stick it to the man and blaze his own path, who passed judgement on everyone but himself with no self-awareness of his own hubris. He was both unswervingly self-affirming and supremely obtuse.
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Such was Thoreau. Such was his book.