Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 125evidently fathomless, bottomless. It is something that awes Thoreau, and yet with
which he feels intimate (“I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven /,” he says, “Than
I live to Walden even”); it is also something that he feels compelled to explore, to test
the extent of, during winter. Negotiating the depth of Walden Pond, Thoreau is
negotiating his own possible deepnesses; contemplating its mysteries, he is also con-
templating the mystery of his own individual soul. Walden is Thoreau, in the sense
that, as he hoped when he “went to the woods,” in discovering and fronting its essential
facts he discovers and confronts his own – he learns of himself in learning about nature.
Since nature and human nature are coextensive in Walden, it is evidently appropri-
ate that the spiritual rebirth of the hero should be announced by the coming of the
second spring. The ice thawing and breaking on Walden Pond is the first movement
in the great drama of rebirth that concludes the book in triumph: a triumph deliber-
ately compared to “the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the
Golden Age.” “Walden was dead,” Thoreau declares, “and is alive again.” The annual
resurrection of nature figures the possible resurrection of human nature, his and
ours. It is not just a figure, however: the rhythms of seasonal renewal ground the
rhythms of spiritual renewal, they supply a resource and correspondence for the soul.
“Wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau insisted in a lecture titled
“Walking, or the Woods” delivered in 1851. More privately, in a journal entry for the
same year, he revealed: “My profession is always to be on the alert to find God in
nature – to know his lurking places.” Both remarks spring from the same insight and
impulse as the ones enacted throughout Walden: a root belief in nature as a material
and mystical presence, requiring our respectful attention and conscientious steward-
ship. To conserve nature, as Thoreau saw it and explains it throughout his writings, is
to preserve human nature; to care for it, to cultivate it, is to care for and cultivate the
human spirit; to save it is to save ourselves.
‘The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe to be bad,” Thoreau
declares defiantly right at the beginning of Walden. The defiance found practical
expression during his residence at Walden Pond. Refusing to pay poll tax to a
government that supported the Mexican War – a war he considered to be merely a
land-grabbing scheme for Southern slaveholders – he was imprisoned for a day. The
imprisonment briefly interrupted his sojourn in the woods. More importantly, it
inspired him to write “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849). For Thoreau, there
was a higher law which the individual had to obey even when the government of the
day violated it. “The only obligation which I have a right to assume,” Thoreau argues
in “Civil Disobedience,” is to do at any time what I think right.” If that meant breaking
the laws of the day, then so be it: “under a government which imprisons any unjustly,
the true place for a just man is also in prison.” The doctrine of passive resistance was
a natural consequence of Thoreau’s belief in the ultimate authority of the self. It was
to exercise a profound influence, in the next century, on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King. And, as Thoreau became increasingly involved in the antislavery move-
ment in his later years, he became less convinced that resistance had always to be
passive. He was profoundly moved by his meeting with John Brown at the home
of Emerson in 1857, and celebrated Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia,GGray_c02.indd 125ray_c 02 .indd 125 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM