Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, by Lawrence Buell

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Henry David Thoreau by Lawrence Buell

As author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau is the most socially influential 19th century American writer in the 21st century. Although Mark Twain and Walt Whitman left indelible marks on American literature and the American sensibility, Thoreau’s DNA has had more demonstrable outcomes. Walden, his memoir of life in the woods, is the taproot for John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carsen, the wellspring for the environmental movement. The language of his “Civil Disobedience” essay has been claimed as a birthright by activists and troublemakers on both ends of the political spectrum. 

Lawrence Buell condenses Thoreau’s life and writings into a slender, cogent volume. The Harvard literature professor, a specialist in the Transcendentalism that shaped Thoreau, writes as fan and scholar. Buell measures the man, weighs his words and defends him against the charge that Thoreau was a poseur. Although not wealthy, Thoreau was comfortably middle class and his sojourn in the cabin overlooking Walden Pond was closer to backyard camping than roughing it in the wilderness.

But as Buell argues, Thoreau’s self-mythologizing is part of Walden’s charm and never occluded the intensity of his response to nature. With heightened awareness of his surroundings, Thoreau understood the lives of humans, animals and plants as partakers in an ecosystem. His mentor, the Brahmin philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “likened Thoreau to Pan, the nature god who beckoned others into the green world,” Buell writes.

The Thoreau who emerges from Thinking Disobediently is like a monk, unaffiliated with any organized religion, with Walden as his hermitage. Thoreau found a sense of exultation, “of being elevated to a higher plane of being,” through contemplation and self-searching. And like a monk, he felt beholden to laws higher than those passed by any legislature, including the U.S. Constitution. As Buell summarizes, “direct action by persons of conscience is the rightful form of resistance” to injustice “and the best guarantor of success.” Thoreau called on his readers to act “by principle, not prudence, willing to risk all for the cause.” Thoreau’s critics charge that he risked little—spending a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes as a gesture against the Mexican-American War and slavery before a relative paid his debt—but he transmuted the incident into the literary gold of “Civil Disobedience.”

Buell acknowledges that Thoreau has been misused, citing the doomed young Alaskan adventurer Christopher McCandless, found dead with a heavily highlighted Walden in his backpack. He never mentions Ted Kaczynski, but one wonders if the Unabomber wasn’t acting from a warped interpretation of Walden and “Civil Disobedience”?

Buell concludes by asking readers to treat Thoreau “not as an oracle but as a stimulus to see and be beyond the ordinary,” as inspiration for maintaining awareness and purpose in the face of routine and banality, already the curse of social life in Thoreau’s time.

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