The first time I trespassed on Walden literary territory was during my junior year as an undergraduate student, since it was required that all English majors with an American Studies minor attend the Survey of American Literature class. I have never been partial to anything that comes under the title 'required', so this was no exception. However, with the exuberant nature of the lecturer and the provocative appeal of his teaching methods, I embraced the ride. It was in the second half of the first semester that we encountered the American Renaissance, or better, that IT hit us face on. Coming from a nation that has always striven to express its individual self amid all the conformity of tradition and burdensome tillage of the past, we could relate to the essays of Emerson and to the Walden experience of Thoreau. We could not, in turn, understand how their contemporaries were not able to relate to these appealing notions of the unity of nature, humanity, and divinity, since it all seemed a very novel idea, disregarding the original period in which it was written. Nonetheless, our class was a survey-based study of American Literature, attending to the needs and demands of the curriculum, chronologically treating all the major and minor 'isms' of American (non)fiction responses.
Approaching Thoreau's
Walden for the second time, with a new agenda in front of me, I try to grasp the wilderness experience in accordance with this new agenda. As I read towards the last chapter, I am tempted to agree with those scholars who view the piece as a latter-day spiritual autobiography. For example, to Paul Schwaber, Thoreau belongs to the pantheon of a few great presences in our midst, who have managed to live a unification of mind, aspiration, and event. However, the fact that Thoreau published
Walden seven years after its initial composition, working on the manuscript so diligently, ironing out the oddities and inappropriate elements, makes me wonder about the validity of the moral development as foreseen by Schwaber in his essay.
As I try to find a comprehensive answer to some of my questions regarding the validity of Thoreau's coming of age, I think back at the Don Henley's Madison Square Garden concert, an effort on the behalf of the rock star and his musician friends to save Walden from developers. However, the pond and the parcel of forest that Henely and comrades were trying to salvage bore little, to no resemblance, to the one Thoreau lived beside in the 19th century. Then why bother saving it? Again, it all seems to boil down to our desperate need to believe in the purity of things, objects, landscape, people or words. In the desperate search for such genuine answers, definitions, examples, expressions, solutions, I also came across R. W. Lewis's remark on Thoreau's Walden. It reads: "Thoreau liked to pretend that his book was a purely personal act of private communion. But that was a part of his rhetoric, and Walden is a profoundly rhetorical book, emerging unmistakably from the long New England preaching tradition; though here the trumpet call announces the best imaginable news rather than apocalyptic warnings."
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