Pond scum can be so inviting
In which our hero labors to find meaningful tension in the life and work of Henry David Thoreau
In 2015, I fell in love with Kathryn Schulz’ New Yorker article “Pond Scum,” or “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau: Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish ‘Walden’?” This, I felt, was the greatest takedown of Thoreau since the episode of “Cheers” when Diane quoted “Simplify! Simplify!” and Coach responded, “Why didn’t he just say one ‘Simplify’?”
Schulz calls Walden “The original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.” She quotes a Harvard classmate who described the young Thoreau as a man “preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.” She finds Thoreau “as parochial as he was egotistical.”
I cheered all the way through. Here was everything I had objected to, but had been unable to articulate, when my high school teacher took us on a forced march through this alleged classic of nature writing. Why should we see this narcissistic proto-libertarian sourpuss as a hero? If you have to compare the activities at all, why is sitting alone looking at ants inherently more moral than trying to build community with your fellow humans?
It has since become fashionable, especially among my friends out West, to dismiss Walden as fake wilderness, because Thoreau’s mother kept doing his laundry and baking him cookies. But this is a too-easy dismissal. As Schulz writes, “The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That’s just the gap between aspiration and execution.” Instead, she wrote, the problem is that he “lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities.”
Most of Walden is not nature writing, as Schulz shows. It’s an old-fashioned New England sermon. Thoreau had rejected the church, but he didn’t reject everything the church had built up in his society, all the asceticism and mind/body dualism and fear of emotional expression and most especially the judgementalism. Instead of applying this toxic stew to Godliness, the way preachers intended, he applies it to Nature.
I felt this deeply, because I had gone to high school less than 15 miles from Walden Pond. Our class was expected to accept and admire Thoreau’s ideas the same way we admired Robbie Ftorek’s hockey skills, as an example of a local boy made good. The attitudes and judgments behind Thoreau’s ideas were invisible—shared so widely that my teachers and classmates and family couldn’t even see them.
Which made them all the more insufferable. This was a big part why I had moved to the West, I realized. Not just to get away from Thoreau or the churchy institutions that had shaped him. Not just to get away from people who unquestioningly admire him, who think and talk just like him. But to get away from a culture that still does not grasp that a sermon is only one way of looking at the world—perhaps a flawed one.
I tried sharing some of these thoughts with friends, and even on social media. I probably failed to articulate them effectively (as I may still be doing here!). But a funny thing happened as I talked and thought and wrote. I came to almost like Thoreau.
Schulz had introduced conflict into the story. Not that Thoreau’s life lacked conflict: he argued with churches and tax collectors and neighbors and railroads and factory-owners and slaveowners and his fellow abolitionists and people who were already suffering enough from quiet desperation. But he was always so sanctimonious that I didn’t feel like I had a stake in his conflicts.
Schulz has received criticism for failing to grasp Thoreau’s irony. (His comment about the poor man, “If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it,” has to be a joke… right?) Or his community-mindedness. Or his curiosity. Reading the critiques caused me to experience the delightfully conflicted feelings of having a stake in an argument. I hate to criticize Schulz but can sort of see the point. The conflict over interpretations brings me closer to Thoreau — creates a story — in a way that Thoreau’s self-absorbed conflicts never did.
Armed with the productive sense of conflict, I’m able to ponder Thoreau anew. I see avenues to developing my own interpretations of his life and works. Might I end up disagreeing with both Thoreau and Schulz? Indeed, might that be what each of them would want?
Notes:
My favorite Thoreau biography is Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1958. It’s hard to find and rather dense; a more accessible introduction is Samuel A. Schriener, Jr., The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind (bookshop affiliate link) New York: Wiley, 2006. There’s a great deal of scholarship at
Someday I may share my own interpretations of Thoreau. Please share yours in the comments!
Look forward to your interpretations.
I was vagely aware of the critiques and got a real earful about Thoreau "the handyman" when Gwen and I toured the "Old Manse' in Concord. If our guide was representative, his memory in Concord is not necessarily a fond one. Our guide seemed neutral on Emerson, too. Over exposure like you were subject, too?
I keep a copy of Walden handy so I can return to certain phrases and because of what it represents about my own learning and evolution. I even bought a nice new copy when the one I bought at the UW bookstore in 1971 finally fell apart.
Reading Thoreau was certainly part of my intellectual development. I particularly like his exhortation to let the evening overtake one everywhere at home. And so I will ask, in hopes of calling out your interpretation, whether it is ok that there are thinkers whose lives are not what we (or they) think they ought to have been, but whose words can still instruct and inspire?
Beautiful pics, John. I forgot you grew up nearby. I did as well. I've logged many miles around and in (across) and still find it sublime. As such, it's sad that Thoreau, like so many, thought he could sunder, without consequence, the beauty of such from the glory of its Creator and the worship He deserves. It's the very trap that the Apostle Paul leads with in his epistle to the Romans. "...that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."