“A visit to Dr. Thoreau” is the journey I’m going on with today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp picturing Henry David Thoreau, author of “Walden or Life the Woods,” which was published on August 9, 1854. The stamp itself was issued on July 12, 1967, which would have been Thoreau’s 150th birthday and was my 10th birthday. (I like the fact that Henry and I share a birthday.)
Although “Walden” wasn’t particularly well-received when it was written, later writers and critics have regarded it as a classic. But, as John Updike once noted, this is a mixed blessing. “A century and a half after its publication,” he observed, “‘Walden’ has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.”
I will confess that, like many, I read the book a long time ago and don’t remember much about it, except that Thoreau was an iconoclast who advised me to march to my owner drummer. (What he wrote was: “if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
No, my connection to Thoreau is more visceral. More than a decade ago, when I was in the midst of some very difficult times, a friend suggested that I should take advantage of the warm September day and go swimming at Walden, which is about 15 minutes from my house. Feeling like I’d try anything to help with the despair I was feeling, I went. And somewhere in that half-hour swim, something clicked, and I knew that things were going to be ok. I didn’t know how they would be ok or how long it would take for them to be ok but I knew what I had to do.
Over the next weeks of that long, warm difficult September, I returned almost daily to Walden. On almost every visit, I wasn’t in a great place when I started my swim. And every time, I found some clarity while I was swimming. It was so uncanny, that I started talking about my daily “visit with Dr. Thoreau.”
Things did, in fact, get better and fall came, so swimming ended for the year. But since then, I’ve found that when I’m confused or worried or concerned, “visiting Dr. Thoreau” – which I’ve been trying to do at least a few times a week during this challenging summer – always helps me get the clarity and reassurance I need. Over the years, everyone else in my family has found it works for them too. (Of course, living in New England means this only works during certain months of the year. Walks around Walden at other times are good but they’re not the same.)
Over the years, I’ve had marvelous swims in many different lakes and ponds, many of them in Maine. But Walden is special. There’s something in the air (or the soil or the water or something) that facilitates deeper experiences, such as the one Thoreau sought and, presumably found.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” he wrote, adding, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
I haven’t gone to the extremes he did. But, like Thoreau, I’ve taken something special away from my time at that pond. I hope you have such a place in your life as well, particularly in these especially challenging times.
Be well, stay safe, “suck out all the marrow of life,” fight for justice and work for peace.