Fourth of July: Almost two hundred years ago, Thoreau moved into his Walden Pond cabin

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into the cabin on Walden Pond. Soon after, Harvard asked what he had been up to and Thoreau detailed his adventures for his alma mater.

'Walden' is by Henry David Thoreau.

It’s class reunion season across America – the time when alumni of high schools and colleges gather to see how well they’ve fared when compared with their former classmates. And some of us might naturally wonder how we’ll measure up, in terms of professional and personal accomplishments, when we return to our alma maters.

For a little bit of courage, we can always consult Henry David Thoreau, who moved into the cabin he built at Walden Pond 169 years ago today, on July 4, 1845.

He stayed two years, sustaining himself by taking on odd jobs, but spending most of his time watching nature, thinking, and writing. He left Walden Pond in the autumn of 1847, moving into the home of his mentor and benefactor Ralph Waldo Emerson to help care for the family while Emerson was in Europe.

That’s when a letter arrived from the secretary of Thoreau’s class at Harvard, where Thoreau had graduated in 1837. The secretary was sending along one of those “Where Are They Now?” questionnaires, apparently popular even then, in which graduates can brag about how well they’d done since leaving campus.

Thoreau had little to show for his decade away from an exclusive Ivy League school – little, that is, by the yardstick that most of the world used to measure success. He had no spouse, no regular employment and only a handful of possessions.

But Thoreau was confident enough in his peculiar sense of purpose to fill out the questionnaire matter-of-factly. Asked to state his occupation, he suggested that he was something of an overachiever, having not one job, but many:

“I am a Schoolmaster – a Private Tutor, a Surveyor – a Gardener, a Farmer – a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.”

Later in the questionnaire, Thoreau elaborated on his professional ambitions – or lack thereof: “I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry attractive or otherwise. Indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven and earth.

Thoreau knew, of course, that more than a few of his fellow Harvard alumni might regard  him as a hopeless slacker. With that in mind, he ended his answers to the questionnaire with a postscript: “I beg that the Class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of pecuniary assistance, and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them some advice of worth more than money.”

That advice was eventually distilled into “Walden,” Thoreau’s celebrated classic. The man that classmates might easily have voted Most Unlikely to Succeed now endures in history as perhaps the most famous graduate of Harvard’s Class of 1837.

A good thing to remember, maybe, as we lovers of literature head off to class reunions this summer.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Fourth of July: Almost two hundred years ago, Thoreau moved into his Walden Pond cabin
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2014/0704/Fourth-of-July-Almost-two-hundred-years-ago-Thoreau-moved-into-his-Walden-Pond-cabin
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe