Walden: a philosophy experiment

 

I know everything is bigger in America, but I hadn't expected Walden Pond to be that big. Surely that's a lake by anybody's standards? 

It's only a short drive, about two miles, out of Concord, Massachusetts. There's plenty of parking. But you're in for a shock if you're not local: drivers of car with non-Massachusetts licence plates have to pay $30 to park (otherwise $8). We'd rented our car in New York and it had Florida plates. The woman in the information centre told me the charge is pretty normal for Massachusetts. There are plenty of beaches where the out-of-state cars cost $40, she said.

We'd come to find out about Henry David Thoreau's simple life in the woods, where he stayed for just over two years in a cabin he'd built with the help of his friends. To rub salt in the parking charge wound, the first exhibit we see in the visitor centre is Thoreau's accounts for building the cabin: total cost $28.12. We should have walked, like he did. 

Thoreau's cabin no longer exists, but a replica has been built near the information centre. So after you've watched (for free!) an excellent short film about Thoreau by Ken Burns, narrated by Robert Redford and produced with the support of Don Henley of the Eagles, you can actually go inside the replica cabin and imagine spending time there. It's cosy - small, but not much smaller than the hotel room I'm writing this in (though without shower, fridge, or wifi). 

Then you cross the road to the pond itself. The next surprise is that you can swim in it. There are several lifeguards in duty. If you want to go beyond a couple of nearby enclosed areas of the water, you are asked to wear a fluorescent float, so they can see you in the distance. In late August, the water was warm.

To see the site of Thoreau's hut, you walk along a narrow path that winds all the way round the pond. Every so often you come across little groups of people on the edge of the water, having picnics or swimming. It's delightfully uncommercialised.

And there it is. There's a pile of stones that people put down to mark the spot many years ago. And then there are some new and official stone markers which show where, in 1945, an archaeologist found evidence of Thoreau's stove, proving that the pile of stone wasn't in the exact place, although only off by a few feet.

Thoreau's self-imposed exile to Walden Pond could easily be seen as self-indulgent: he was, after all, a graduate of Harvard and from a relatively well-off family in Concord, where his father owned a pencil-making business. But he was constantly practical and hard-working, whether, building, cultivating flowers and vegetables or writing. And the Walden project was a genuine attempt to find answers to the most basic questions about how to live. 

In Walden (1854), his account of his time in the hut, he complains that "nowadays" there are "professors of philosophy, but not philosophers". He was being a philosopher, learning from a deliberate experiment in which he changed the conditions of his life in order to observe the effects on himself:

"To be a philosopher 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 is to solve some of the problem of life, not only theoretically, but practically."

The practicality of Thoreau's philosophy was put to the test in the middle of his time at Walden when he was arrested for not paying his taxes - in protest against slavery. He spent the night in the Concord jail. Someone paid the tax bill anonymously on his behalf, but Thoreau explained the principle of his action a few years later in Civil Disobedience (1949), which was originally called Resistance to Civil Government.

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison," he wrote.

I hesitated, but decided that our $30 parking charge didn't quite qualify for civil disobedience.