What People Get Wrong About Walden
Episode Stats
Summary
The two years, two months, and two days Henry David Thoreau spent at Walden Pond represent one of the most well-known experiences in American literary and philosophical history. Yet, though many people know of the experience at Walden and the book he wrote about it, far fewer understand its whys, what s and how s. My guest, who has dedicated his career to studying will impact the often-understood nuances and common misconceptions about Walden. His name is Jeffrey Kramer, and he s the curator of collections at the Walden Woods Project, as well as the author and editor of numerous books about including Walden, a fully annotated edition.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
the art of manliness podcast. The two years, two months and two days Henry David Thoreau
00:00:14.180
spent at Walden Pond represent one of the most well-known experiences in American literary
00:00:18.460
and philosophical history. Thoreau's time at Walden has become something of a legend,
00:00:22.880
one that is alternately lionized and criticized. Yet though many people know of Thoreau's
00:00:27.100
experience at Walden and the book he wrote about it, far fewer really understand its whys,
00:00:31.640
what's and how's. My guest, who's dedicated his career to studying Thoreau, will impact the
00:00:36.600
oftenest nuances and common misconceptions about Walden. His name is Jeffrey S. Kramer and he's
00:00:41.520
the curator of collections at the Walden Woods Project, as well as the author and editor of
00:00:45.540
numerous books about Thoreau, including Walden, a fully annotated edition. Today on the show,
00:00:50.460
Jeffrey explains the reason Thoreau went to Walden, which wasn't originally to write about the
00:00:54.060
experience and which ended up evolving over time. We discuss what Walden Pond was like,
00:00:58.640
the dimensions and furnishings of the house Thoreau built on its shores, and how he spent his
00:01:02.400
days there. Jeffrey explains why Thoreau left Walden, how he was less attached to the experience
00:01:06.520
than we commonly assume, and how the significance of the experience came less from living it and more
00:01:10.960
from writing about it. We then discuss how Walden the book became a classic despite an initially slow
00:01:15.640
start, before turning to what Jeffrey thinks of the common criticisms of it and the popular impulse
00:01:20.220
to tear Thoreau down. We end our conversation with what we moderns can learn from Thoreau's
00:01:24.520
experiment with living deliberately. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is
00:01:28.920
slash Walden. All right, Jeffrey Kramer, welcome to the show. Thank you, Brett. I'm happy to be here.
00:01:52.460
So I think everyone, particularly in the United States, if you went to high school, you probably
00:01:56.260
read Walden. I remember, I think it was like 11th grade was when we did American literature
00:02:01.100
or 10th grade, or even if you didn't read it in high school, you might've picked it up and it
00:02:06.180
really resonated with you because you're in that period of your life. You're trying to
00:02:09.800
become an individual and figure out who you are. And there's something about Walden that speaks to
00:02:14.560
that. So I hope we can dig into this, into Walden. But before we do, let's go do like a thumbnail
00:02:19.440
sketch of Henry David Thoreau before his Walden project. When and where was he born? What was his
00:02:25.600
upbringing education like? And you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. So I mean, he's born in Concord,
00:02:31.180
July 12th, 1817. We don't know a lot of specific things about his childhood. We only know a few
00:02:37.640
things, but he did visit Walden for the first time when he was about four or five. His family
00:02:42.640
consisted of his parents, Cynthia and John, his older siblings, Helen, and also John, and his younger
00:02:49.020
sister, Sophia. He attended Concord Academy, which is not the same one that's there today.
00:02:53.880
And as did his brother, John, and they studied things like geography, history, science, but also
00:02:59.420
languages, French, Latin, Greek. And then he attended Harvard, graduating in 1837. He had taken a
00:03:07.020
boat trip in 1838 with his brother, John, from Concord, Mass to Concord, New Hampshire, which became
00:03:13.140
the basis of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. And he also lived in the Emerson
00:03:17.980
household for a while as Emerson's handyman of sorts, helping out in various ways, but also being
00:03:23.520
mentored by Emerson as a writer and helping Emerson with the editing of the transcendental journal,
00:03:28.620
The Dial. Oh yeah, he also fell in love and proposed marriage at that time. And yeah, he had
00:03:34.980
quite a busy time prior to the Walden experiment. And after college, didn't he have a period where
00:03:40.920
he did some teaching as well? He did. So when he graduated, that was going to be his career path
00:03:46.240
to be a teacher. And he did teach in the Concord Public School for a short time, but he left that.
00:03:51.880
He didn't like the idea of having to flog the children as a method of teaching them. And so
00:03:57.040
he quit. And he and his brother, John, started a school, which eventually moved into what was
00:04:01.240
the Concord Academy. And so he did have, I guess you'd call it a traditional career path. He graduated
00:04:07.180
college. He was starting a school. He was teaching. He actually, as I said, had fallen in love and
00:04:13.460
proposed marriage. That didn't work out for various reasons. But then John got sick and they closed the
00:04:18.720
school. And then eventually John died for a completely different reason. He had cut himself
00:04:23.220
shaving and got locked. John died. And that pretty much put an end to Thoreau as a teacher.
00:04:30.300
And how did his death, I mean, besides ending his teaching career, but how did it impact him
00:04:35.140
Yeah. He and John were very, very close brothers. And that death was extremely difficult for Thoreau to
00:04:43.860
get beyond. You know, it was hard for him. People tell stories of mentioning John in passing to Thoreau
00:04:51.960
and tears would come to his eyes. So it was something that affected him deeply, more than I think people
00:04:58.260
tend to realize. And his going to Walden Pond, which we'll talk about, I think shortly, was in part to write
00:05:07.140
a book about John. It was a way of working through that grief. And to write his book, A Week on the Concord
00:05:13.160
of Merrimack Rivers, about this boat trip that he had taken with John, was a way of sort of working through
00:05:19.520
things. And so going to Walden was in part to write that book.
00:05:24.020
So he's a teacher. He was doing some writing as well. When do we know that he's decided,
00:05:30.220
like, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to try this Walden experiment. Do we have an idea when
00:05:35.080
We don't. So, you know, the interesting thing about Thoreau, which I think a lot of people don't
00:05:42.620
tend to realize, is that the narrator in most of his works, whether it's Walden or Civil
00:05:51.620
Disobedience, Katahdin, it's sort of a persona. It's not exactly Henry David Thoreau. It's not
00:05:59.200
the Henry David Thoreau that walked around Concord. So despite the fact that we read Walden,
00:06:04.300
almost his autobiography, it's not. It's creative nonfiction. It's something he worked on. So he went
00:06:10.700
to Walden, really, as he said, to conduct some private business. And that was to write the book
00:06:15.060
about John. And while he was there, people started asking him questions. You know, Henry,
00:06:22.320
what are you doing? If you think about it, Walden Pond or Walden Woods was marginal land. It was land
00:06:28.400
that wasn't good for farming. It wasn't good for much. So it's where people lived who were not
00:06:34.140
sort of welcome in Concord society. It's where freed and slave people had lived. It's where the Irish
00:06:40.900
lived who were there building the railroad, but really weren't part of Concord society. It's where
00:06:46.300
what they called lurkers. I love that word, kind of 19th century work. Lurkers lived in the woods.
00:06:52.640
Alcoholics, just people who were not part of the normal mid-19th century Concord society.
00:06:59.320
So there you have Henry David Thoreau, college graduate, former teacher from a respectable family
00:07:05.820
going off and living in this place where you would not normally expect somebody like that to live.
00:07:10.900
And so people started saying like, Henry, what are you doing? And he started giving a lecture
00:07:16.000
called A History of Myself in part to explain what he was doing. And in that lecture and in thinking
00:07:23.920
about what he was doing, it evolved over time into the book Walden. So I don't think he actually
00:07:29.660
started out to do what we think of him as doing at Walden Pond.
00:07:36.120
Okay. So he went to Walden. He had no intention of writing a book about his experience. He went
00:07:41.220
there to write another book. It was because people were asking him what you're doing. Like, well,
00:07:49.080
Right. I mean, he started thinking about what was he actually doing out there? What was he
00:07:53.720
trying to do while he was living there besides writing the book?
00:07:57.260
And yeah, I think something people need to understand about Concord life. Like, as you said,
00:08:02.040
Walden Pond wasn't great land. People that were there were sort of the outcast.
00:08:05.120
Because Concord at the time was very community-based. Most people lived with somebody.
00:08:10.480
And you were kind of a weirdo if you decided to live by yourself.
00:08:15.080
Yeah. I mean, family was important, being part member of a church, all that community sense
00:08:21.760
was extremely important. And Theron was very close to his family. It wasn't like he was in
00:08:26.980
any way estranged. He was very, very close to his family, loved his family dearly. And so it was odd
00:08:32.360
to kind of pick up and go off. I mean, people did that. I mean, he had a friend who had done that
00:08:36.680
a couple of years previous. But to kind of go off for a long period of time where you're living in
00:08:44.460
Well, tell us more about the spot he decided to build his cabin alongside Walden Pond. So you said,
00:08:48.640
not great land. People in the area, they were freed blacks, the Irish, just sort of the outcasts of
00:08:56.860
Yeah. I mean, it's a lovely pond. It's a kettle pond. It's quite beautiful. Is it the most exquisite
00:09:03.260
pond ever? Is it the most beautiful place on earth? No, it's a lovely pond. It has become more
00:09:10.700
lovely or more beautiful in the eyes of people who look at it through Thoreau's eyes, who come to it
00:09:15.860
because it's Walden Pond that he wrote about. But it's a fairly ordinary pond, I'd have to say. He was
00:09:22.760
living on Emerson's land. Emerson had some woodlots there. And Thoreau got permission from Emerson to
00:09:29.000
build a house there in which he could write, sort of as a writer's retreat, basically. And he did not
00:09:34.960
live for free off of Emerson's land. I just want to sort of clear up the ideas that Thoreau may have
00:09:40.060
been living off of people. That's actually not true. He worked for Emerson. He did manual labor for
00:09:45.600
Emerson. He did things like help plant pine trees in Emerson's woodlots. He did various things to help
00:09:50.360
out the Emerson's. So it was a bartering for permission to live there. And he built himself
00:09:55.800
this house. And I want to say it's a house, not a cabin or a shack or a shanty, which is how a lot
00:10:02.060
of people refer to it. It was a place he was planning on living for a while and establishing
00:10:06.100
himself for a while. And it's interesting that he had the front door of the house situated in a way
00:10:12.900
that would allow him to see the sunrise most mornings when he opened the door. But the most beautiful
00:10:19.500
part about the whole move to Walton Pond is that he moved on July 4th, which in most people's mind is
00:10:26.980
Independence Day. He is trying to strike out some kind of independence from his existence as it was.
00:10:34.360
But he went to write a book about his brother John, who he's thinking about often. And John's birthday is
00:10:41.320
July 5th, which means that in moving to Walton Pond on July 4th, his very first day of his new life at
00:10:50.540
Walton Pond is his brother John's birthday. And that's kind of a beautiful, has a beautiful symmetry
00:10:56.780
That's interesting. I didn't know that. So, I mean, in Thoreau's mind, in his, in like, you know,
00:11:00.800
we're talking about Thoreau himself, right? The real Thoreau. He went there for his brother's birthday.
00:11:05.460
I mean, that's probably what's going on. But then afterwards, when Thoreau was writing Walton,
00:11:10.300
did he make a significance that he moved in on July 4th?
00:11:15.480
Yeah. I mean, there are, there are things that he is saying in the book that are, I think are also
00:11:22.960
true. I mean, it was an Independence Day of sorts. He went to live deliberately. There are things that
00:11:27.820
he says in the book that I think are absolutely true, but they also become true through the writing
00:11:35.200
of the book. It's a process in which he's thinking about his life.
00:11:40.120
So I want to talk more a little bit about Walton, the physical aspect of it. Was it far away from
00:11:46.760
It was, it was very close. I believe it's about a mile or half a mile from town. He could walk into
00:11:52.220
town on the railroad tracks if he wanted to go that way. It's an easy walk. And he would walk into
00:11:58.240
town almost every day to go to the post office, to get the newspaper, to visit friends and family.
00:12:03.940
People would visit him at the pond. It was not secluded. It was not a wilderness area far away
00:12:12.120
from humanity. In fact, the Irish who were building the railroad lived at the time he was there on the
00:12:17.860
other side of the railroad tracks, which means he could literally hear the Irish workers who lived
00:12:24.020
there from his, his own house. He was that close to other people. So not some kind of go off into the
00:12:31.380
wilderness and not come back for two years. It wasn't that kind of experience, but it was far
00:12:35.300
enough away where he could be alone. Yes, absolutely. So talk about more at this house,
00:12:40.980
like how, what were its dimensions? How big was it? What were its furnishings? And why do you think
00:12:45.760
Thoreau, you know, he's in the, in Walden, he spends a lot of time like doing the calculations,
00:12:50.520
like on the cost of my house, like what was going on there? Why did he do that?
00:12:54.300
I think in part, because he wants people to know that it was real, that it's, it's actually, he did
00:13:00.320
build a house. This is what it costs. This is what, what he did. And I think it hits home that what he
00:13:06.960
was doing was an actual real life choice that he was making at the time. The house itself was about
00:13:14.160
10 by 15 feet. For comparison, you might want to realize that most single dorm rooms are less than
00:13:19.980
that. So when people come to the pond, to Weldon Pond, and they stand in the replica that is there,
00:13:26.420
I think they're often surprised at the size of it, because it feels bigger than they imagined it to be.
00:13:32.000
The house had a root cellar, a garret, a closet, a brick fireplace. For furnishings, he had a bed,
00:13:38.820
a table, desk, three chairs, as he said, three chairs, one for solitude, two for friendship,
00:13:44.780
three for society. He had a small mirror, a pair of tongs and andirons, and for cooking,
00:13:49.620
dining. He had a kettle, skillet, frying pan, a dipper, washbowl, two knives and forks,
00:13:55.800
three plates, one cup, and one spoon. He also had an oil lamp and a jug for oil and a jug for
00:14:01.340
molasses. Before the second winter, he also added a small cooking stove. And so if you think about
00:14:07.240
those kinds of furnishings and the things he had, that's a pretty comfortable existence for somebody.
00:14:13.540
Okay, so after he builds the cabin, like what was the typical day like for Thoreau at Weldon?
00:14:17.380
What did he, how did he spend his time? Yeah. Well, one of the first things he did
00:14:21.940
was he had a morning bath. So he loved to go out into the pond. He said that he was inclined to
00:14:28.340
think bathing almost one of the necessaries of life. But he says it's also surprising how
00:14:32.340
indifferent some are to it. If you think about it, like books of hygiene from the 19th century
00:14:36.940
indicated that bathing for cleanliness had not yet become a practice. It was clear that people weren't
00:14:41.440
bathing to be clean. So his was more of a spiritual practice. In fact, there's a story he tells in his
00:14:47.500
journal about a farmer, Minot, who he was talking to. And he said he was thinking of bathing after he
00:14:55.280
was done with his hoeing. And he doesn't mean his hoeing for the day. He actually means his hoeing
00:14:58.960
for the growing for the entire season. So Minot was going to bathe after he did his hoeing and
00:15:04.920
taking some soap and going down to Walden and having himself a bath. But something had occurred to
00:15:10.000
prevent it. And Minot said that he'll just go unwashed until the next harvesting. So, I mean,
00:15:15.060
you're talking about farmers who haven't bathed for over a year. So Thoreau was doing something a
00:15:18.980
bit unique, but it was definitely a more of a spiritual exercise than anything. He would work
00:15:24.200
in his bean field doing some hoeing or other work, sometimes followed by another bath. He confessed
00:15:29.460
that sometimes he would sit in his doorway from sunrise till noon in some sort of reverie, just thinking
00:15:35.340
about things. The afternoon was then free in which he could explore the natural world around him or
00:15:41.480
walk into town, visit friends and family in town or at Walden and also to read and to write. So he
00:15:47.300
spent many hours not only exploring the world around him, but many hours thinking about it, reading about
00:15:53.000
it and writing about it. Well, I want to talk about the reading aspect. Let's talk about the bean
00:15:57.320
field because he has a whole chapter dedicated to the bean field. Why did he decide to grow beans?
00:16:02.440
Because from my understanding, beans weren't a very profitable crop.
00:16:08.880
Yeah. That is a question that comes up a lot. And Thoreau himself didn't particularly like beans.
00:16:15.420
So it's kind of an interesting thing. And he did it sort of as a cash crop, but as you say,
00:16:20.300
it's not very profitable. I think it plays on a pun. And that is in the idea that a person doesn't
00:16:27.860
know beans. There's a New England phrase. I don't know if it's all over if everybody uses it, but
00:16:32.580
they don't know beans about nothing. They don't know beans about this. They don't know beans about
00:16:36.400
that. And I think just the idea of saying, I want to know beans means I want to know things. I want
00:16:43.200
to understand things. I want to be able to grasp things. So yes, he did grow beans. And yes, he had
00:16:48.040
a field where he grew various crops, but I don't think that's the reason for it being involved. And
00:16:54.360
I think the reason is really to talk about that idea of wanting to know things, to know beans.
00:16:59.780
And I also think he picked beans because they didn't require a lot of work. He had other stuff.
00:17:06.620
He was more important things to think about besides food.
00:17:09.960
Food. Yeah. And also, I think it was sort of a, kind of a, he was being a, what's the word? A rebel,
00:17:17.140
right? Because at the time, this agriculture was really picking up in Concord. All the scientific
00:17:20.980
methods about how to get the most yield. And Thoreau, you know, in his section about growing
00:17:26.100
beans, he'd just say, ah, you know, I'd sprinkle them around and I'd hoe around a little bit.
00:17:30.460
That's it. I think he's kind of like putting a thumb in the eye of those guys.
00:17:34.540
Yeah. And in the second year, there was a frost that killed a lot of things. And so
00:17:38.700
it's not that he's that upset about it. It's not like it was his livelihood.
00:17:42.620
So you mentioned the reading. Thoreau said he had this whole chapter about reading the great books.
00:17:47.480
So we're talking Homer and Aristotle and even the Bhagavad Gita. But he even admitted, well,
00:17:53.800
when I first got there, I was hoping to read a lot, but I didn't read as much as I wanted.
00:17:59.120
He was just, he was busy. Not just busy finishing up his house, which did take time. And
00:18:03.800
as well as the bean field. It's interesting. People think of him as
00:18:08.220
being off in the woods and not really doing anything, but his job, his reason for being,
00:18:15.560
the things he did was studying nature, exploring, thinking, writing. Those are his tasks.
00:18:24.400
So I think he didn't have enough time for actual reading because he was so busy doing other things,
00:18:32.300
So you said that he went there to write this book about him and his brother. Did he write that book
00:18:39.760
He did. Yeah. So while he was at Walden, he wrote two drafts of his first book. He also wrote drafts
00:18:45.940
of Walden. So Walden in its first iteration was written at Walden Pond, even though the later
00:18:52.220
versions of it were written after he was back in Concord. And he also wrote the essay Katahdin from
00:18:57.880
the book, The Main Woods, and probably some kind of draft or note on civil disobedience because he was
00:19:04.200
also arrested and put in jail while he was there. So there was a lot going on in those two years,
00:19:10.780
Well, see, I don't think a lot of people know that. I think a lot of people think he just kind
00:19:13.700
of hung out and looked at nature, but he was productive. Let's talk about the nature because
00:19:17.960
a lot of the book is just about his observations of nature. What was going on there? Was he trying
00:19:24.000
to be scientific? Was he trying to contribute to what nature is and what it's like, or was it
00:19:30.300
something else going on? I think there's something else going on. I mean, people use his observations
00:19:35.440
now to talk about global warming and to show how things have changed. And so his observations being
00:19:41.080
very precise are very helpful now, but I don't think that was his purpose. I think his purpose
00:19:46.480
was to try to understand the world we're in. If you think about nature as a gift, a gift from God,
00:19:56.180
the natural world as a gift. It's a holy place. It's sacred. And to spend time out in nature,
00:20:04.600
trying to understand this world we are blessed to be in was equivalent to anybody else going to
00:20:11.460
church. It was a way that he worshipped God, worshipped the world we live in, worshipped the
00:20:18.000
greater things around us. So there's that. But there also is trying to understand literally about
00:20:24.640
why does this plant grow here and not there? Why, when you cut down trees in a field,
00:20:31.320
does a different kind of tree grow? Why or when does the ice break up on Walden Pond? And what
00:20:36.640
does that mean? So he is conducting his own kind of somewhat scientific experiments to try to
00:20:43.060
understand things also at the time. Yeah. One of my favorite ones is he tries to figure out how deep
00:20:46.960
Walden Pond is, goes on the ice. And he drops a hammer down there and he's able to fish it up
00:20:52.440
somehow with a rope. Yeah. So he would have a rope that would have knots in it that would tell
00:20:57.280
him how deep it is. And he'd put a weight, usually I think a rock, so that you can tell when you are
00:21:02.660
plumbing the death by putting the rope with a rock, you can tell lowering it down when it hits the
00:21:07.680
bottom because there's a give to the rope. So in doing that, he could very accurately measure
00:21:12.440
Walden Pond. So his measurements that he made in all different directions across the pond,
00:21:17.380
when they've been tested by today's method are extremely accurate.
00:21:22.340
So you mentioned he, besides writing his book, besides, you know, working on his beans marginally,
00:21:27.160
besides the nature observation, he spent time writing in his journal.
00:21:32.280
When did he start keeping a journal? Was it like right when it seemed to be moved in and
00:21:35.420
what was his journaling practice like in general?
00:21:37.600
It was before that. So it's literally on October 22nd, 1837. That's when he made his first
00:21:44.140
journal entry. So he had been living off and on in the Emerson house, but of course,
00:21:49.040
visiting with Emerson a lot. And, and they would have lots of discussions. And it's interesting
00:21:54.460
that Emerson wrote in his journal on the next day, October 22nd, that he was trying to think
00:22:00.080
of people who kept journals and he could only name the French essayist Montaigne, his neighbor,
00:22:05.600
Bronson Alcott, his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, and himself. And he said in his journal, besides
00:22:10.360
these, I did not last night think of another, but it's clear that he's having this discussion
00:22:14.740
with Thoreau. And so he then asked Thoreau, what are you doing now? Do you keep a journal?
00:22:21.920
And so Thoreau made his very first entry that day in response to Emerson's question.
00:22:27.700
And then he was writing in it for most of his life until he got too weak and ill in later months
00:22:33.620
to actually write in it. But he wrote in it almost every day.
00:22:37.960
Everything. So as he said in, at one point, he said, my journal is that of me, which would
00:22:45.280
else spill over and run to waste. So it's a, it's a place to put his thoughts. It's a place to
00:22:50.940
practice his writing, to rewrite things, to edit, to think about things. It was a, in some ways,
00:22:57.980
a storehouse for information, for thoughts. But, you know, the journal is kind of interesting
00:23:02.860
thing that people look at as almost like a diary, which it's not. I mean, there's a difference
00:23:09.000
between, you know, a diary and journals, but in some ways that's more of an academic difference
00:23:14.880
than how Thoreau might've looked at it. But people look at the journal as almost as his
00:23:20.940
first response. He's going out in nature, he's doing this or that, something happens,
00:23:24.900
let me write my journal. But often he was writing in a field notebook, just a cheaper notebook in
00:23:29.520
which he could jot down notes while he's out in the woods. He's not carrying his journal around
00:23:33.660
with him in the woods. And that's where he's writing his first thoughts. And then he would
00:23:37.500
transcribe those entries into his journal, but not always right away. Sometimes it would be that day
00:23:44.720
or that evening. Sometimes it might not be for a day or two. And Thoreau's a writer. So obviously he's
00:23:50.420
going to take the ideas that he put down in one form in the field notebook. And as he's writing
00:23:56.080
into his journal, he's already sort of editing and creating and rewriting as things go. So the
00:24:01.180
journal's often, in many cases, a second idea, second pass on things, not always. And so that
00:24:07.280
writing process would be a place where he would put all of his thoughts into those journals. But when
00:24:12.420
he wants to give a lecture, he would go through the journal and call out ideas that worked together
00:24:19.880
to create a lecture and eventually an essay, eventually an essay that might end up in a book.
00:24:25.340
But there are places where he is, he will write something and then he will rewrite it the next day
00:24:30.780
or several days later. There's, I once sort of tracked down the whole different drummer passage
00:24:37.820
that's so well known about Thoreau. And you can see him perfecting this over a period literally of
00:24:43.940
years where he's tossing the idea around and then he writes something and he rewrites it three months
00:24:49.020
later or six months later before he gets it just right to make that such a quotable phrase.
00:24:55.340
Now that process sounds a lot like what writers do today. You know, like some guy has a tweet
00:24:59.820
and they'll take that tweet and then they turn into a blog post. And then it might take that blog
00:25:04.500
post and it turned into a lecture or like a TED talk or whatever. And then that TED talk turns into
00:25:08.440
an article for the Atlantic Monthly or the New York Times. And then they get a book deal.
00:25:12.460
Yeah. And it's, it is exactly that same process. It's, it's taking that idea and using it in various
00:25:19.000
forms and adjusting it to the next level per se and, and seeing what you could do with it.
00:25:25.260
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:25:31.960
And now back to the show. So when did Thoreau decide to leave Walden Pond?
00:25:38.220
Well, he left on September 6th, 1847. And he left for, you know, actually a very mundane
00:25:44.900
reason. And that was that Emerson was going away on a lecture tour to Europe and Mrs. Emerson,
00:25:51.800
Lydia, and wanted somebody to take care of her and the house children while Emerson was gone.
00:25:57.680
And Thoreau had lived in the household before. He was very close to the family. The children loved him.
00:26:07.260
He was there for two years, two months, two days, kind of a beautifully symmetrical number that has
00:26:13.200
absolutely no significance that anybody's ever figured out. But the, you know, it's interesting
00:26:18.160
when we think about when he was at the pond or when he left the pond. So people sort of almost
00:26:28.100
conflate the name Thoreau and the name Walden together. I mean, you can almost, it's almost difficult
00:26:33.400
for people to take the name Thoreau away from Walden or Walden away from Thoreau. They're so
00:26:38.940
joined at the hip, so to speak, as if it was something that Thoreau could not live without
00:26:44.720
being at Walden Pond. But there's an interesting thing, and it's not in any biography ever. And I
00:26:49.680
actually have no idea why biographers sort of either don't see this point or refuse to see this point.
00:26:55.920
So as I said, Emerson was going away on a lecture tour to Europe and asked Thoreau if he would come
00:27:03.040
take care of the family. And Thoreau, of course, is going to say yes. He would absolutely do that
00:27:08.100
for his friend. But Emerson wasn't leaving for almost five weeks when he asked Thoreau. And Thoreau
00:27:14.260
did something that is so significant. It was when I first realized it, it just kind of floored me.
00:27:20.880
He packed his bags and moved to the Emerson house. He could have actually stayed at Walden for about
00:27:26.360
four, four and a half more weeks than he did. And so you have to ask yourself the question,
00:27:32.440
if being at Walden Pond was so important to him, so significant, so something he couldn't do without,
00:27:42.560
he would not have moved to Emerson's house until the day Emerson was getting on the coach or the train
00:27:47.420
to go to Boston to get the boat to Europe. But he packed his bags and left. And the reason for
00:27:53.420
that, I think, is that because, as I said, we tend to equate the things he writes with autobiography,
00:27:59.380
but they're not. And so it is actually, I think, the writing process in which we are meeting the
00:28:12.040
Yeah, so personally, he was probably ready to move on.
00:28:16.260
Well, he said this about ending his Walden experiment. He said,
00:28:20.180
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several
00:28:25.340
more lives to live. I cannot spare any more time for that one.
00:28:29.800
Absolutely. You know, and it's so that the 26 months he spent at the pond, I don't think they
00:28:35.980
were life-defining moments in the same way that, you know, the various other things he did,
00:28:40.160
including the night in jail or other things, were not life-defining moments. They are moments that
00:28:46.780
inspired him to ask questions about his life or life in general and things that he would then write
00:28:56.520
about. And in that writing process, that's when Henry David Thoreau becomes Thoreau.
00:29:01.900
So when did he decide to write Walden? So you mentioned as soon as he went out there,
00:29:05.840
he started getting asked questions, did this lecture about an autobiography for myself.
00:29:09.800
How far into the experiment did you say, I got to start writing a book about this experiment?
00:29:14.360
Yeah, I mean, it's a little unclear because nothing's dated, you know? So, I mean, there are
00:29:19.680
manuscripts in there. We have the various drafts of Walden, but it's not clear exactly when those
00:29:24.880
started. But I would say pretty immediately into the experience when people are starting to say,
00:29:29.920
hey, what are you doing there, Henry? He started thinking about what did it mean to be there.
00:29:35.560
And then how long did it take to write that first draft of the book?
00:29:38.440
Well, he wrote it while he was at Walden, so definitely within a year or two of being there,
00:29:43.420
because he was only there for two years. You know, and then the rest of it took,
00:29:46.800
I mean, there were seven drafts, so basically nine years to write the book that we know as Walden.
00:29:51.920
Yeah, and you said in one of your other books, Solid Seasons, which is about the friendship of
00:29:56.840
Thoreau and Emerson. Going back to this idea, you said that the writing of Walden,
00:30:01.500
not the actual visit to Walden, though living at Walden, was more significant. You said two years
00:30:06.140
at Walden Pond were not in the end as momentous and as transformative as the writing about those
00:30:11.460
events. I mean, I want to flesh this idea. I mean, so like, what do you think was going on
00:30:15.800
in Thoreau's head? So you said there's like Thoreau the person, but the Thoreau we're seeing in
00:30:20.640
Walden is not, it's like creative nonfiction. Right.
00:30:25.380
So what, I mean, was he trying to do, like, was he trying to take transcendental ideas that he was
00:30:30.540
kind of baking in, stewing in, and superimposing that on his Walden experience, or was something
00:30:36.460
else going on? I think there's some of that. I think it's, so there's, this is a hard one to
00:30:44.200
actually say out loud to people, but there's very little that Thoreau did that was original.
00:30:49.880
So, you know, we can't think of somebody going off to live in the woods without thinking of
00:30:54.440
Thoreau. We can't think of somebody performing an act of civil disobedience and going to jail for
00:30:59.960
the things they believe in without thinking of Thoreau. But all those things have been done before
00:31:03.680
by many people. It's in the writing of those experiences that he turns it into something,
00:31:09.060
not just personal to himself, but universal, that at that point, we cannot think of that experience
00:31:16.120
without thinking of it as Thoreau. So, you know, when you look at, for instance, Walden,
00:31:22.940
when the book was first published, it was called Walden or Life in the Woods. And he left very clear
00:31:30.500
instructions before he died that that subtitle should be stricken off. The book should no longer
00:31:35.980
be called Walden or Life in the Woods. It should just be called Walden. And I think, I mean, he never
00:31:41.920
states why he did that, but I think the reason is because people were confusing what the book was
00:31:48.180
about. And so when I teach Walden to students or anyone, I don't talk about Walden as a book about
00:31:56.060
a man living in the woods. I just talk about it as a book about a man living in which he's asking
00:32:02.500
himself and his readers questions about how do you conduct your life? How do you conduct your life
00:32:07.880
in relation to your government, your church, your society, your family, your friends, everything
00:32:13.100
around you? How do you conduct your life in such a way that you hopefully can get through it without
00:32:18.460
having regrets? And so I think it's important to remember that I think all of his works are works
00:32:27.020
which are questioning how do we live our lives. You know, it's not, I mean, even civil disobedience,
00:32:33.360
it's not just about, you know, his non-payment of taxes or what he was supporting. It is really
00:32:39.260
about how does a person interact with a government, for instance, that you feel is doing something
00:32:45.500
morally reprehensible. What do you do as an individual about it? Walden is the same. What do you do as an
00:32:52.480
individual to make sure your life is on the right path and you're doing the right things?
00:33:00.160
Yeah. So you said it took nine years for him to finish Walden. When it was released,
00:33:08.320
There are some good reviews. There are some bad reviews. I would say overall, it was not terribly
00:33:13.640
successful. There was an initial run of 2,000 copies, which is, you know, all right. It's not a great
00:33:20.520
number. And it took the rest of Thoreau's life to sell that out. But there were people who loved it
00:33:26.560
and were amazed by it. There was a man in New Bedford, a Quaker named Daniel Rickardson, who
00:33:33.280
started a friendship with Thoreau, started correspondence and a friendship because of
00:33:37.520
that book. So there were a lot of people who liked it. It was well-respected in some literary
00:33:41.820
circles, but not all. And then after Thoreau died, the book at that point had sold out and then went
00:33:46.820
back into print and has remained in print ever since. So it is actually literally one of the few
00:33:52.020
books of American literature that has virtually been in print ever since it came out. And that
00:33:56.560
doesn't happen for most books. They go out of print for periods of time. And that's never happened
00:34:01.360
for Walden. So the interesting thing is that although it didn't have a huge success, you know,
00:34:08.440
he, for instance, when he died or many years after he died, when they were putting together a collected
00:34:14.500
set of his works, he was, for instance, the first American author to have his journals printed in
00:34:20.400
full or what were virtually in full at the time. That didn't happen for other more successful or
00:34:26.420
well-known authors. It wasn't Emerson. It wasn't Hawthorne. It wasn't Melville. It was Henry David
00:34:31.360
III who has journals published in full. So I think he was respected in many ways, but he really wasn't read
00:34:38.200
a lot. And really he wasn't read in colleges and such until the 1940s and 1950s. So for virtually a
00:34:49.000
hundred years after he died, he was really just kind of a footnote to Emerson and the transcendental
00:34:55.820
ideas. People weren't really reading him a lot, but things changed. And now he is, you know, well-read
00:35:02.820
a lot. He's certainly read a lot. Yeah. What happened? What caused his change? This happened to Melville
00:35:07.280
as well. I remember when Moby Dick came out, it wasn't a success, but it wasn't until like the
00:35:10.980
20th century that became this American classic. What happened with Thoreau? Yeah. I mean, in fact,
00:35:15.820
in Melville, when he died was virtually forgotten, which is amazing when you think about it. I think
00:35:20.580
for Thoreau, it was the right things at the right time. So by in the 1940s, people were reading things
00:35:30.600
like civil disobedience and they were literally using it during World War II to be conscientious objectors.
00:35:37.280
You know, the reason people read Thoreau varies a lot. I mean, you have people who
00:35:42.520
love the nature writing. You have people who love the civil disobedient. You have people who love
00:35:48.920
various aspects of the spiritual, whatever it is that people find in Thoreau, and that comes
00:35:53.240
in different periods. So when we get into, for instance, the 1960s, you know, where Thoreau is
00:36:00.100
considered like the original hippie, it's people who are trying to find a more natural way of life.
00:36:05.560
So in a more simple way of life. So of course, Thoreau is going to appeal to them.
00:36:09.540
You have people later who it's all about nature and the descriptions of nature and the understanding
00:36:14.900
of nature. You have various reasons for why people read Thoreau. But I think once people got hold of
00:36:20.120
Thoreau starting in the 1940s and 50s, people didn't stop reading him.
00:36:25.580
So let's talk about some of the criticisms that are levied at Walden. Because Walden's one of those
00:36:28.600
books that people, either they love it. Well, I don't know. Maybe there's a lot of people
00:36:32.680
that are indifferent to it. But people I've talked to, they either love it, they're like,
00:36:36.760
I read that book when I was in high school, and it's like really influenced me. Or there's people
00:36:40.200
who's like, ah, that book, what a phony. I mean, that's one of the criticisms of Thoreau's
00:36:45.620
experiment. It was insufficiently authentic, right? I mean, they say that, well, Thoreau made it sound
00:36:52.500
like he was living this very wild and solitary life when he actually was close to town. He regularly
00:36:57.920
had visitors. And then he, you know, Thoreau, he makes himself out as this paragon of self-sufficiency
00:37:02.920
when his family sometimes fed him and so on and so on. What do you think about that criticism?
00:37:08.020
Yeah. You know, so I think the people who think they know about Thoreau, they really haven't read
00:37:13.940
his works. Or maybe they've read Walden, for instance, but it's a cursory reading. They're not
00:37:18.520
really paying attention. Because they're not getting at what Thoreau wrote. They're only getting
00:37:22.880
some ideas of what they think Thoreau wrote about. Thoreau is really clear everywhere in that book.
00:37:28.340
He is not off in the wilderness. He is not far from town. He talks about walking into town
00:37:32.660
every day or two. He talks about visitors. He talks about visiting people. He is literally not making
00:37:38.760
any of those statements that people levy against him. And so people are coming to Walden with
00:37:45.480
misconceptions that they will not let go of. And every so often, people write articles about Thoreau,
00:37:52.240
and Thoreau being the hypocrite that he is and all that kind of thing. But that's because people
00:37:56.000
are not reading him carefully. You know, they think of him as some kind of hermit, somebody who
00:38:02.660
went away from society. Not true. Society was always important to him. I mean, being part of a community,
00:38:09.440
being part of Concord, being part of his family. Those were important things. He didn't walk away from
00:38:13.800
anything or try to get away from it. You know, it's kind of interesting. If you think about the time he
00:38:19.280
spent at Walden Pond, the two years, two months, two days, that's 5% of his life. That means that
00:38:26.600
95% of his life Thoreau was spent living in a town, primarily Concord, a short time in New York and
00:38:33.280
in Cambridge. But somehow we ignore this Thoreau who spent his day interacting with family and friends
00:38:40.180
and farmers, strangers, students, employers, audiences, and think only about the time at Walden Pond,
00:38:48.180
turn him into a hermit, and then call him a hypocrite because he wasn't. I just think people
00:38:54.380
are, they get him wrong. I talk to a lot of students, and for many of them, that idea of
00:39:01.700
living a Thoreau life has to do with separating themselves from society, shutting off their
00:39:07.340
phones maybe, or unplugging their laptops, going off on their own, living in the woods or some
00:39:11.580
equivalent or like Christopher McCandless going off into the wild. And I tell them, no, you've got it all
00:39:17.120
wrong. That is not what it's about. It's just about how to live your life. And I think people
00:39:23.780
who feel that they need to do something Thoreau and in doing that, it is going and building a
00:39:30.720
cabin in the woods or going off somewhere to the mountains or whatever are really missing the
00:39:35.720
point of what the book is about. Yeah. You say it's about living deliberately,
00:39:39.540
right? Not necessarily, not deliberately in the woods, but just living deliberately in general.
00:39:43.720
Absolutely. And people love to tear down iconic figures. I mean, there was an article in the
00:39:50.700
New Yorker several years ago by Katherine Schultz, where she just tears Thoreau down. Several years
00:39:55.460
before that, John Updike had done a similar kind of piece tearing Emerson down. I mean, there's just
00:40:01.020
something about a target. And, you know, it's easy to like fling accusations at writers you don't quite
00:40:10.100
understand. And there are reasons why writers do that because it certainly gets them an audience.
00:40:15.240
We're going to cheer them on. But yeah, I think you're right. I think most people do either love
00:40:18.820
or hate Thoreau. I don't think there's any sort of middle ground with him. I remember giving,
00:40:23.380
I was giving a lecture somewhere and somebody came up to me beforehand and said, oh, you're doing the
00:40:28.600
Thoreau talk later? And I said, yeah. And she said, I hate him. And it's like, oh, well,
00:40:33.440
then don't come. You know, I don't understand why people are so interested in tearing him down.
00:40:41.760
Read Thoreau. If you like him, keep reading him. If you don't like him, put the book down and go
00:40:46.440
somewhere, do something else. But there are people who are strongly vehement about tearing him down
00:40:53.000
and calling him a hypocrite. Yeah. And I think what you've been saying that it wasn't, the actual
00:40:57.280
Walden experience wasn't that, I mean, he'd like, he left, right? He just, it wasn't, he wasn't attached to
00:41:03.160
it. But I think he saw that it was a symbol for something larger of that whole idea that he
00:41:09.120
wanted. I'm going to, you know, I'm not just going to do whatever my parents did or what,
00:41:12.920
you know, Concord people want me to do. Like, I want to, I want to live life on my terms. That's
00:41:17.960
what, like, Walden is just a symbol of that. Right. Yeah. And it's, you know, I think about the
00:41:25.220
criticisms about him that being like contradictory and all that, but, you know, I actually love that
00:41:31.660
about him. I mean, I, it's part of what attracts me to him as a writer and as a human being,
00:41:36.880
you know, when we have these iconic figures, we sometimes like to make them out of stone and not
00:41:42.280
out of clay. We want them something solid and not really malleable and want to be able to say
00:41:46.820
Thoreau was a, whatever, a blank. And that should be who Thoreau is from the day he was born till the
00:41:51.860
day he died. But, you know, I mean, the fact is Thoreau was the vegetarian who ate meat or the
00:41:56.480
conservationist who surveyed woodlots to be cut down, the pacifist who endorsed violence. I mean,
00:42:01.520
he's the hermit who loved gossip. There's just so much that is not, I don't want to call it
00:42:07.180
contradictory or even hypocrisy. It is a person who is absolutely willing to question everything
00:42:16.780
about himself all the time and to grow. And it's something that people, I think, have trouble with.
00:42:24.340
No, I totally get that. I mean, I love Thoreau for that reason too, is what he does in Walden,
00:42:28.900
you have these, you know, these things where he's kind of like, you know, ranting about some
00:42:33.180
aspect of life. And it's not that he's like, well, I'm just going to reject that. He's like,
00:42:37.360
well, I'm still going to take part in that. But like, I mean, here's some stuff that I'm just,
00:42:40.360
I, it's not, it's not that great. Maybe I can make it better. So for example, you know,
00:42:45.040
we often think of Thoreau as this, this hermit, this loner, but like you said, he had guests coming
00:42:49.420
in all the time. He had this one instance where he talked about, I had like 20 people in my house.
00:42:53.480
Um, so he loved people, but then he has this thing in this, in the chapter on solitude. I just,
00:42:59.040
I laughed out loud and I read it. He said this society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very
00:43:05.080
short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals
00:43:11.020
three times a day is my favorite part and give each other a new taste of the old musty cheese
00:43:16.760
that we are. And you read that, man, Henry, you're, you're cynical. But I mean, I think all of us
00:43:22.760
experienced that, you know, we, you might, even though you love being around people,
00:43:25.840
there's periods where just like, ah, just these people are annoying me. I need a break.
00:43:32.280
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, cause he, he did love people, but he, you know,
00:43:36.560
people talked to him as, as if he was, he didn't like people and that's so wrong because he actually
00:43:42.000
loved conversing with people. But what he particularly loved in conversing with anybody is an exchange
00:43:47.900
of ideas. So, you know, he doesn't want to sit around and say, Oh, what'd you have for lunch?
00:43:52.920
You know, it's really, you know, what did you think about while you had your lunch? What,
00:43:56.400
what are your thoughts? And if those thoughts hadn't changed, there's no point in getting together
00:43:59.660
again. You know, he was, he was annoyed when people wanted to come on walks with him and walking
00:44:05.420
in the woods was not for thorough. That was work. He is working when he's walking in the woods.
00:44:12.220
And he said somewhere that, you know, he wouldn't necessarily follow a doctor and watch them,
00:44:17.600
you know, with a patient you, you, cause they're doing their work. But when thorough is out in the
00:44:23.420
woods and doing his work, people just think he's walking in the woods and having a nice time of it.
00:44:28.460
So people would accompany him sometimes. And that was exasperating to him because it was interfering
00:44:32.880
with his, his process. Well, another contradiction I noticed in Walden is, you know, he'd have these
00:44:38.840
rants against industry and business, but at the same time there, he'd had these sections where
00:44:44.060
he would speak admirably of the spiritedness of these new, new England industrialists. And I thought,
00:44:50.920
I mean, I think, I mean, that's what, I think a lot of people have a hard time with individuals who
00:44:54.880
are like that, who won't take sides on things who can see both the good and bad. And that's one of
00:44:59.000
the things I love about thorough. Yeah, me too. And, and people like look at some of the things he said
00:45:04.360
about industry and think he was, you know, some kind of Luddite who did not like progress, but
00:45:08.940
again, that's so absolutely not true. I mean, he was very interested in progress. If you think about
00:45:14.260
it, he was published by some of the greatest publishers of his day who use the greatest and
00:45:19.640
newest techniques for publishing. You know, he used the railroad. I mean, it's the railroad had things
00:45:24.960
that were annoying about it. They were noisy and, and they caused fires and woods were torn down. But on
00:45:29.720
the other hand, that railroad was something that allowed thorough to get from Concord to Cambridge
00:45:36.080
or Boston to use the libraries in a relatively short amount of time. So these were tools to be used.
00:45:41.780
Um, I know there's this passage where he talks about farmers and how they used to set their,
00:45:49.500
their time pieces or watches, clocks, whatever, by the sun and the sun is overhead. It must be noon.
00:45:55.820
But when the train started coming through Concord, they started setting their time pieces by the
00:46:01.440
train, the trains coming through, it must be two o'clock and, and losing that sort of vital connection
00:46:07.720
to the world around them. And so thorough, I think was somebody who admired technology, but did not
00:46:14.040
love it when technology ruled people, you shouldn't set your clock by the train. So, you know, I think
00:46:20.920
about just all of the people today, myself included, how we're tied to our phones, you know, things like
00:46:27.360
that, the, the, the phone buzzes or rings and some kind of message, you know, we got to go see who it
00:46:32.220
is or what they're talking about and not refusing to run just because the bell goes off to use
00:46:39.400
technology as a tool. I mean, people say would, if they were here, wouldn't he have a laptop? And it's
00:46:45.620
like, well, of course he'd have a laptop. He's a writer. What writer doesn't have a laptop?
00:46:49.440
You know, he loved to do research. Think of the, the, you know, how much they would love the idea
00:46:55.180
of going on the internet and finding most of the books he's looking for, you know, right there for
00:47:00.440
him to read. It would be amazing. So, but that would be using the technology and not letting the
00:47:05.740
technology use him. Yeah. That's a common thing he looked at in Walden. Like don't become a tool of
00:47:10.340
your tools. Exactly. Talked about the rails. Like we used to write on the rails, but now the rails
00:47:14.720
write on us. Don't avoid that. Make sure you use this stuff, but don't make sure you're not
00:47:19.580
subjected or like you're, you become a servant to this stuff. Yeah, absolutely.
00:47:24.900
So what principles or inspiration do you think people in the modern world here in the 21st century,
00:47:30.480
whether they live a more wild or more domesticated life, what do you think they can take from Thoreau's
00:47:36.040
Walden experiment? Well, I think certainly the idea about questioning what we're doing,
00:47:41.180
why we're doing it. I think trying to understand, I mean, a lot of what Thoreau is about is trying
00:47:46.540
to understand who he himself is. What does he feel and think about things? There's a quotation
00:47:51.880
that I actually love. It's one of the shortest ones. So I can actually memorize it. And he said,
00:47:57.620
if I am not I, who will be? And I love that because so many of us, whether we're children,
00:48:04.820
students in high school or college or adults, we could be 80 years old and still doing this where we,
00:48:10.520
we sometimes deny or hide who we are because we want to be accepted. We want to be brought into
00:48:18.880
the fold, you know, things like that. And so we spend a lot of our lives not being true to ourselves
00:48:25.940
for various reasons. And I think the thing like that's most inspiration about Thoreau is the idea
00:48:31.900
that you need to be true to yourself and figure out who you are and then be that person. I mean,
00:48:37.120
if you think about how absolutely unique each of us are as individuals, you know, that we should be
00:48:44.580
proud of who we are, what we believe in, what our preferences are, what are, you know, anything
00:48:50.980
about us, it makes us who we are. And that's such a beautiful thing that comes out of Thoreau.
00:48:56.040
So you've been studying the life and writings of Thoreau for decades. I'm curious, in your own life,
00:49:02.140
how has his thoughts and ideas influenced you? And then also like, how has it changed as you've
00:49:07.640
gotten older? Because I think it's interesting. I think a lot of us read Walden when we're
00:49:11.140
17, 18, or early 20s. And it hits different from when you're in your 40s and 50s. So I'm curious,
00:49:18.420
personally, how has that influenced your life? Yeah. In fact, it's one of the things when I talk to
00:49:23.540
high school students and they don't like the book, I say that's absolutely fine, but read it again when
00:49:28.180
you're 30 or read it when you're 50 or 60 because it will be a different book. You know, I mean, it's
00:49:32.320
been really helpful to me in ways that, it's kind of hard to sort of figure out how to phrase it, but
00:49:41.180
it's really taking the ideas that Thoreau has about questioning ourselves and testing them out on me.
00:49:49.820
You know, it's taking the ideas of simplicity, it's taking the ideas of being true to yourself,
00:49:55.400
it's taking the ideas of not harming other people, being good to the world around you,
00:50:01.040
trying to improve the world around you, that you have to take sort of seriously. There's a
00:50:06.100
great quotation, if I can remember it exactly, by the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber. And Buber had
00:50:13.060
said that Thoreau, he addressed his readers in a way that they discovered not only why Thoreau acted as
00:50:19.440
he did, but also the reader, assuming him of course to be honest and dispassionate, would have to act in
00:50:25.360
just such a way whenever the proper occasion arose, provided he was seriously engaged in fulfilling his
00:50:30.660
existence as a human being. And I kind of love that idea that when you read Thoreau, or at least
00:50:36.920
when I read Thoreau, I want to be better than I am. I want to be a better person. I want to do more for
00:50:43.340
my neighbors or the people around me. I want to make the world a better place. And that is what I get out of
00:50:49.140
Thoreau and find most inspiring about him. Because he doesn't really let you off the hook. And I
00:50:56.440
don't want to be let off the hook. I don't want to glide through life, as he said, like his neighbors
00:51:01.540
who are asleep. I want to be awake to what's going on around me and face things, whether it's good or
00:51:08.140
bad, but face them and deal with them in whatever way I can. Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great
00:51:13.340
conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work? So they have a website,
00:51:18.040
www.jeffreyscramer.com. And that's where people can sort of keep tabs on the work I'm doing and
00:51:24.300
where I might be speaking or what I'm publishing these days. And for the work I do for the Walden
00:51:29.660
Witch Project, they can go to www.walden.org and find out about what I'm doing there.
00:51:35.340
Fantastic. Well, Jeffrey Kramer, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:51:37.840
My pleasure. And thank you so much, Brett, for inviting me.
00:51:40.940
My guest today was Jeffrey S. Kramer. He's the curator of collections at the Walden
00:51:44.460
Woods Project Library. He's also the author and editor of several books about Thoreau
00:51:48.480
and Walden, including Walden, a fully annotated edition. You can find more information about
00:51:52.500
his work at his website, jeffreyscramer.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:51:57.160
slash Walden, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:52:07.920
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:52:11.900
at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:52:16.100
written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
00:52:19.700
episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
00:52:23.980
sign up, use code MANLESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you're signed up, download the
00:52:27.920
Stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast.
00:52:31.780
And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple
00:52:34.540
Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the
00:52:39.020
show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.
00:52:41.900
As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you not
00:52:45.420
to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.