Thoreau de la Walden : The Hipster from Concord

Walden is my chill-with-a-book book, my meditation guide, my psychedelic trip without psychedelics. I took that trip again this weekend and I want other people out there in the vast wide world to know that you too can take tickets for the same ride. That is why I am writing about Thoreau and Walden, lying in my backyard hammock at the dark hour of 11 pm, listening to crickets, enjoying the slightly nippy late summer air – it is as much Walden as it can get in the rural Pacific Northwest.

Thoreau, came to me late in life. In my late thirties, I stumbled across Thoreau in my quest for a true American thinker, and found the first American anarchist. I realized that the concept of civil disobedience that I had credited Mahatma Gandhi with and on which much of India’s freedom movement had hinged on, got main street cred through Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience in 1849, twenty years before Gandhi was born. When MLK referred back to Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement to push forward his dream of racial equality, the idea of civil disobedience completed a full circle. A modern American construct, expounded and practiced by Thoreau came back home to roost during the Civil Rights era.

The people who resemble Thoreau the closest in this day and age, to me, is not the Sierra Clubbers (for Thoreau is often credited as being one of the people who laid the foundation of the modern environmental movement) but the Antifa. I often feel that the black hoodied hipster with long hair from Portland (OR) protesting police brutality could be Thoreau, if he was present in the present day. When Thoreau defended John Brown in his ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ before even other fellow abolitionists would take up a stand for John Brown shows he was the original American anarchist and practiced what he preached.

Reading Walden again, I am struck by the timelessness of the work and how contemporary Thoreau sounds even now, almost two centuries after he had penned his masterpiece. Here he is anticipating the meat-free destiny of man kind, the creation of PETA, vegetarianism and alternative meat - “...whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of human race, in its gradual improvement, is to leave off eating animals….” He condemned hunting although he had been on hunting expeditions as a teen. Here is Thoreau again from Walden, “no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

Thoreau sounds relatable because there are a lot of similarities between his day and the times we are passing through now. Whether it is the millennials who cannot afford to move out of their parents’ homes or the matter of black lives being a hot topic again or the polarization of the nation into conservative south and liberal North/West, 150 years hence we are fighting about the same things and feeling their effect as Thoreau and the U.S populace did in the mid 1800s.

Thoreau lived at his family home, he worked at his family’s pencil factory, paid his rent to his family. Later on, he learned surveying to take it up a vocation. He is the millennial brother-in-law, who will baby sit your kids (he did this for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids) while you and your wife goes out on a date in town. He is the same millennial who abruptly quits the rat race to live off the grid in Alaska (Thoreau had to settle for Walden because Alaska was Russia’s at the time), in a tiny home he built all by himself. He was a minimalist, an environmentalist, an abolitionist fighting for the rights of slaves, a vegetarian, a tiny home builder building a home using recycled materials and a disobedient civilian before any of these were considered cool.

He was a white man from Massachusetts, who could quote Vishnu Purana in the 1850s. You have to understand Hare Krishna movement was still one hundred years in the future and Beatles was yet to discover Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation. Thoreau says that Vishnu Purana says (I have to take Thoreau’s word for it, despite being born in India, I have not read Vishnu Purana), “The house-holder is to remain in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.”

Just like us, currently bewildered by shipping delays in Amazon and shocked by empty shelves at Walmart, Thoreau was utterly surprised by where the things for his daily use (in the days before his life at Walden) came from. Most of our stuff in 21^st century comes from China by the way. That’s why the shelves are looking forlorn at big box stores these days, thanks to the Covid triggered supply chain bottle-neck, Chinese govt. restrictions and to a small extent to that minor traffic incident at the Suez canal turn pike. Here is Thoreau again on learning the pots he used at home was made by an actual potter who lived in town and were not the ones passed on down unbroken from our Mesopotamian ancestors, “I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood,” Thoreau could have made a solid career in stand-up comedy if he was alive now.

Many intellectuals classify Walden as fiction and Thoreau as a loser, a cynic disappointed by the system and the order of things. But Thoreau is much more than Walden. Walden is just a field-guide for all the could-have-beens if we were brave to jump off from the gerbil wheel we all are endlessly running on. Thoreau stands tall because we are still talking about him, the issues he stood for and the stands he had taken are still as relevant today as it was then.