122 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865“philosophers.” “There are nowadays professors of philosophy,” he confides to the
reader. “Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.” “To be a
philosopher,” Thoreau suggests, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to
found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of
simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” It might seem unfair to claim
that Thoreau is measuring here the difference between Emerson and himself.
Nevertheless, Thoreau did try to live according to the dictates of Transcendentalism
to an extent and with an intensity that Emerson never managed. Far more than his
teacher, Thoreau wanted to know how it felt to live and see truly: to experience that
knowledge in the body, the senses, as well as understand it in the mind. He also
wanted the reader to go with him on what he called his excursions into nature, and
into himself. He does not simply instruct, as Emerson does, he makes us share the
experience; while we read his books, vicariously, imaginatively, we join in his life.
Thoreau pursued a pattern of alternating entry and withdrawal in relation to
society. He was educated in the woods near Concord but also at Concord Academy
and Harvard. At college, he came under the sway of various teachers – the poet Jones
Very instilled in him a lifelong passion for Greek, and for the metaphysical poets –
but he was also known as an individualist and a rebel. After graduating, he taught
school for a time with his brother John, following the principles of Bronson Alcott.
And it was with John that, in 1839, he made a trip on the Concord and Merrimack
rivers. Later, while residing at Walden, he used the journals he had kept during the
trip to produce his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). In
it, Thoreau appears for the first time as a living realization of Emerson’s American
Scholar: in his characteristic role, that is, of “Man Thinking” on the move. The book
also introduces the reader to Thoreau’s characteristic style, which is essentially a
rhythmic flow of description and apparent digression: a dramatic articulation of
what appears to be spontaneous thought and intimate talk. The sudden, unexpected
sound of a drum beating on the Merrimack, for instance, stimulates excited reflections
on the links between man and the universe, music as “thought colored and curved,
fluent and flexible,” and on the ironic discrepancy between the magical character of
the wind’s music in the telegraph wires and the mundane nature of the financial
news those wires are made to carry. “I require of every writer,” Thoreau was to say in
Walden, “a simple and sincere account of his own life”; and simplicity and sincerity
were certainly his touchstones. But that should not blind us to the lyricism, the wit
and panache of his writings. Like the great Romantics, Thoreau worked hard, and often
artfully, to catch the casual rhythms of a mind in process – a mind that is process – and
the moments of illumination to which its chancy, volatile movements lead.
When his brother John became fatally ill in 1841, the school Henry had run with
him was closed. Henry then lived with Emerson for ten years, serving as a general
handyman. During this time, he became an intimate of the members of the
Transcendental Club, and contributed work to The Dial; he also developed his skills
as a surveyor and botanist. A period working as a tutor on Staten Island was followed
by a return to Concord; and it was on his return there that he went to live nearby
Walden Pond from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847. Other TranscendentalistsGGray_c02.indd 122ray_c 02 .indd 122 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM