This past week, I watched with interest the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Henry David Thoreau, someone I find so interesting that I own a red T-shirt emblazoned with his image and one word.
That word is “Simplify.”
He is usually classified among the 19th-century writers, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, known as “transcendentalists.” So, how do we put those two together to “transcend” and to “simplify?”
First, “transcend,” which literally means “trans” to move across and “scend,” to rise as in “ascend.” These folks strove to rise above and toward something. Toward what, inquiring minds ask, to which we can reply that which is true. In Thoreau’s time, that search led him to the abstract truth that slavery was wrong even though apologists for that institution claimed the enslaved were better off than they would be if they were free and left to their own abilities.
Thoreau’s one word motto of “simplify” provides guidance but not particular prescriptions, probably because he would have been hard-pressed, at least originally, to articulate the specific values he sought. So, he begins by rejecting the values he sees in his community and embarks on his two-year stint living alone in a one-room cabin he constructed on the shore of Walden Pond, a walk away from his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. He did not live as a hermit; this was not an exercise in survivalism. Rather, it was his bold attempt to simplify his life to determine essential values that were not readily apparent in the social environment of the time.
Those values included questioning prevailing Christianity, which had moved away from its trinitarian roots into Unitarianism, which transcendentalists such as Emerson still found too restrictive. Emerson himself had been ordained as a Unitarian minister but abandoned that role in his search for something more basic, and perhaps more inclusive of the larger non-Christian population.
If it is difficult to summarize what Thoreau discovered in his experiment living at Walden Pond, we can identify certain fundamentals. One way to do that is to imagine how he would respond to today’s interconnected world, which in short would horrify him. He took quite seriously the title of Emerson’s famous essay “Self Reliance.” His experiment in living at Walden Pond for two years was his way of acting upon that advice, in the transcendental sense, to go beyond the superficial environment of society to find fundamental truth.
That truth builds upon Emersonian self-reliance. Space doesn’t permit an extended exploration of what he discovered. But an interesting clue can be found in his choice of the implement he employed for the tens of thousands of words he produced, first in his journal and then the books drawn from it.
Most writers in his time employed pen and ink. Thoreau wrote in pencil, perhaps because he worked in his family’s business manufacturing that implement. But maybe, as well, because a pencil’s eraser provides easy erasure of an idea which upon reflection could be better expressed or abandoned.
His view of self-reliance extended to rejecting involvement in the larger society which would impose its norms on him. He was involved with family and friends but saw no need to be connected beyond them, thus no use for the telegraph network stretching across the continent, nor for the dissemination of ‘news,” which he famously described as “gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”
For Thoreau, then, his transcendence is to rise above societal norms to find the truth to be experienced living side-by-side with unchanging nature at Walden Pond.