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Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Lawrence Buell: Thoreau is a wonderful spokesman for the hazards of relying on the wisdom of elders and the need to check yourself for how much of your thinking as usual is an implant from your tribe, your family.
Your community, and do so in the assumption that you need to self correct against that and strike out in your own way. A dose of Theropian disaffection and dissent can stand a person in good stead, not just a young person, but a person at any age, I think. How to be constructively and fruitfully irreverent and escape from the traps that otherwise would ensnare you.
And at the same time, avoid an extreme of perversity this opposition For opposition's sake,
Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. In 1845, when he was 27 years old, Henry David Thoreau walked away from his home in Concord, Massachusetts. And built a small house on a small lake, Walden Pond.
It was two miles away, he lived there for two years, two months, and two days, and he wrote about it. Walden has since become a classic, a treasure to scientists and philosophers, historians and hipsters, conservationists and non violent resistors. Anyone who would think disobediently. Something about abstaining from society and its affordances.
Reconnecting with the land, searching for something beyond the ordinary, living independently, self reliantly, intentionally, deliberately. Just listen along with this famous passage from Walden, and it's hard not to be stirred. I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to affront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life. Living is so dear. Nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.
Since then, Thoreau has risen to a kind of secular sainthood, perhaps the first of now many spiritual but not religious. How should we understand Henry David Thoreau's thought, his writing, his action, his way of life? With me today on the show is Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus.
at Harvard University. He's the author of many books on transcendentalism, ecology, and American literature, and his latest book is Henry David Thoreau, Thinking Disobediently. It's a brief philosophical biography and introduction to the thought of Thoreau through his two most classic works, Walden and Civil Disobedience.
In today's episode, Larry Buell and I discuss Thoreau's geographical, historical, social, and intellectual contexts, his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Just why he went out to live on a pond two miles from home for two years, two months, and two days, and how that changed him. The difference between wildness and wilderness, why we're drawn to the simplicity of wild, natural landscapes, the ideals of moral perfection, the body, the senses, attunement, and attention, the connection between solitude and contemplation, the importance of individual moral conscience, and the concept of civil disobedience.
Thoreau's one night in jail and the lasting legacy of his political witness, and ultimately what it means to think disobediently. Thanks for listening.
Larry Buell, thank you so much for joining me on For the Life of the World. It's a pleasure. He's joined me to talk about a really iconic American thinker, Henry David Thoreau. Most people associate Thoreau with a pond, but what I want to do with you today is explore his thought and writing. And you might say his very life as a means to learn more about what was going on in America at that time, what was going on in the history of philosophy at that time.
And you've written a recent book, Henry David Thoreau, thinking disobediently. And so I'm excited to talk to you about this thinker. I wonder if you could begin by just saying who was Henry David Thoreau?
Lawrence Buell: Thoreau was a man of many talents who lived and died in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. His mental travel was impressive.
His physical movements mostly confined to the New England region. That was the country of his imagination when he wrote about landscape and place, especially his backyard of Concord that became, uh, suburbanized in early industrial times, uh, during his life. And that was an important theme for him. He was a college graduate, Harvard, And upon his graduation, he came under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was the leading spokesperson for the so called Transcendentalist movement, whose epicenter was conquered.
And as I say in my book, Thoreau, therefore, has claimed to be the only one of the major figures of the movement who was born Transcendental, and had the most mentors among the, among older generation, the founders of the movement. Emerson took him under his wing. as a literary mentee, too, encouraged his poetry and then his non fiction writing, tried to help him get published, including in the leading magazine of the movement called The Dial that Emerson edited along with Margaret Fuller.
And the upshot was that Thoreau's first work quite closely reflected that of his mentor, but as he, uh, moved through life, he became more independent, understandably, and just as well. And the later Thoreau that focuses more on natural history and science was his own trajectory, for sure. He was influenced by the Transcendentalist movement in the sense that most of them were anti slavery people, as he was.
But as he matured, so did his thought and so did the distinctiveness of his writing and the political
Evan Rosa: area. I would love to hear a little bit more about the relationship that he had with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Would you describe that mentorship and the qualities, maybe some of the events, like what would that have been like?
Lawrence Buell: First of all, I want to emphasize how remarkable it was for a master disciple relationship to play itself out. With the two of them in such close proximity, Thoreau's entire life, and for Thoreau to have emerged for posterity as a figure equal to or greater than Emerson in his charisma and influence, that is truly remarkable, perhaps unique in world history.
Perhaps only the likes of, how did that happen, what Lato and Aristotle can compare to, was enabled I think because of the central doctrine, as Emerson put it, of the movement itself, which he tried to adhere to lifelong. The infinitude of the private man, as Emerson memorably sums it up. If you really adhere to that, then you aren't going to be a micromanagerial mentor.
You're going to be an enabling figure, who's greatest desire, as far as your disciples are concerned, is for them to go their own way, which is what Thoreau eventually did, although he internalized a lot of Emersonian ideas in the process. So that dynamic is a very interesting one because of these unique features.
It also can be said that they both were only human, and there was a certain sort of edible aspect to the relation. Some tension, Storrow matured, and Emerson still considered him a likely lad, or a less likely lad, as Storrow was a late bloomer and took a while to publish in a really original voice. And, uh, there was a sort of cooling off, perhaps.
Even a break in that relation around Thoreau's 30th year as a result of some misunderstanding surrounding Thoreau's first book and his sense that Emerson didn't tell him straight what he really thought about it until after it was too late and out and an unsuccess in the public share. But in any case, they remain quite symbiotic through life, and a mark of that is Emerson preaching the funeral sermon at Thoreau's early death, and the thoughts that Emerson had after Thoreau's death, Thoreau kind of haunted him always, haunted him in a good sense as a person who had meant a lot to him, as well as vice versa.
So there was some kind of reciprocity there as it developed, as well as tension in the relationship
Evan Rosa: between the two. Do you recall any of the statements that Emerson made in that sermon? Yes.
Lawrence Buell: He emphasized in his profile Thoreau's prickliness. There was something military in Thoreau's manner, as if he, uh, his first instinct upon hearing a new proposition was to controvert it.
A habit, Emerson adds, tongue in cheek, a little chilling to the social affections. He's acknowledging the disobedient streak in Thoreau there. A little less kindly, one of Emerson's more genteel friends described when he said Thoreau always insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end. When does disobedience tail off at the perversity?
But Emerson goes along and praises Thoreau for his uncanny rapport with the natural world and the solid knowledge that he had, which put Emerson's amateur natural history buff inclinations in the shade. He praised the side of Thoreau that made him a very successful civil engineer, a surveyor, which is how he won back the respect of the community in midlife, his precision, his exactness.
And when it came to summing up Thoreau as a person, Emerson. He replayed the idea of disappointed promise a little bit more than was comfortable for the family and other Thoreau friends, saying that instead of being an engineer for all America, he was content to be the captain of the Huckleberry Party.
It's important to realize that the way that he is measuring Thoreau in that address is is the way that he measured even the greatest figures of world history, from Plato to Shakespeare to Napoleon to Goethe. He measures every one of them against the highest possible standards of accomplishment and being, and by those standards, everybody falls short at last.
And my thought is that, uh, if Thoreau had lived to hear Emerson's funeral address, he would have understood that. He would have understood that he was being measured against the highest standards, and he would have done the same if Emerson had died before him. He probably would have dished out the same kind of measuring an actual biography against the highest possible standards.
Which begins to get at the underlying principles of Thoreau's way of thinking, being, and evaluating.
Evan Rosa: As a final bit of biography, I'm wondering if you would both read the opening lines of Walden, as well as describe his experience entering the woods for two years and two months. Glad to. When you get the text, the sacred text.
Yes, yes. I imagine your copy of Walden has gold leaf on the edges of the pages, right? Yes. Thank you.
Lawrence Buell: No, it doesn't. It's dog eared and all that. I have, I have one that's fairly pristine, but the one that I favor using has been read to death, as the Germans say.
Here goes. When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of that, I lived alone in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself on the shore of Walden Fond in Cochran, Massachusetts. and earn my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months.
At present, I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you would summarize from there or talk about the place that this errand in Walden Pond held in his life.
Lawrence Buell: Yes. Walden had a luminous attraction for Thoreau from the time that he was small. In the book itself, he mentions having been carried there at the age of four by his parents, who were fond of taking the family on nature foragings of different kinds.
And in fact, if we look at his journal in the early years before he goes to Walden, then we can see a lot of hints Walden is beckoning him. Even at one point, he wants to go live on its shores and listen to the wind among the reeds. So, this idea of Walden as a memory place already, before he even goes there, and after he leaves it, thinking retrospectively about it.
in the same way and revisiting it hundreds of times at pleasure and to do measurements like the behavior of the pond and botanical expeditions that fortifies the wrongheaded assumptions that many Thoreauvians have had over the years that he lived much a longer time at the pond or that he never left the pond really.
It's a luminous place of his imagination. off and on, at least lifelong. Now, it happens that Emerson owned land that he allowed Thoreau to build on, so could Thoreau have conducted his two plus years experiment there? If that hadn't been the case, maybe not, but that worked in his favor. That it was accessible from where he lived, a pretty easy walk, that was a plus.
Thoreau's often associated with the idea of wilderness. The really wildness is more his key rubric and wilderness and it's the wild spaces. or wildish spaces uh near home that he especially resonated with and felt the advocate of.
Evan Rosa: Would you describe that difference between wildness and wilderness?
Lawrence Buell: Yeah wildness is unkempt nature that can be close at hand like a swamp or a bog.
He loved nature. Traipsing around in the swamps and bogs of Concord, which the Hemp were attracted because they teemed with biodiversity. They were also unmanageable. They were beyond the power of agro encroachment or industrial exploitation at that time. That said, he could see that there was a lot of swamp draining of some of the landscape in the Sudbury Concord Essebit river system that he knew intimately for agricultural purposes and It was the fashion of the day.
Look at, on a big scale, the Mississippi River, how it was channelized over time so as to be able to take advantage of the rich alluvials that would get seasonally flooded. So Thoreau was a defender of unkempt landscape, and that's really the touchstone for wildness in his imagination. Wilderness.
Wilderness Thoreau would use in a more conventional way. For him, upcountry Maine was the touchdown that was still much unexplored except by Native Americans and under harvested even by the increasingly active timber industry.
Evan Rosa: So, so many people have, and perhaps the pun is intended, a romantic idea of Thoreau at Walden.
I wonder if you could speak to some of. That imagination, the wildness and the draw to the pond, what the pond symbolizes or really is, what it was. inactuality for him?
Lawrence Buell: Yes. Well, the sense of Thoros as a romantic figure in a romantic landscape is partly created by the book itself. And some readers, particularly those who themselves are familiar with much more wild landscapes than Thoros, uh, can be disillusioned when they see that.
And what's more, in Thoros time, The landscape of his town, including around Walden, was much tamer than it is today. Concord is today 35, 40 percent wooded over. In his day, it was down to about 12 percent because of the agricultural development. It was just taking a turn from agriculture to industry at that time.
But another way of looking at this, which helps to explain the The text is that Thoreau felt rightly, A, that he didn't have to move very far from the center of town. In order to take a very big step of distancing himself from social interaction as usual, and business as usual, the removal was a strong statement, considered strong in the eyes of his community, that he was taking a different path, decidedly, from what was expected of him as a Harvard graduate, particularly, which would have been to work its way towards, um, I respect that we'll post this, uh, a doctor or a lawyer or a pastor, but the, um, way that people lived in those days before the idea of an upcountry getaway or vacation in the bosom of nature was normalized in America, it wasn't for another generation or so.
Um, as Concordia historian Robert Gross says, Nobody lived alone. To live alone was itself perverse, or a sign of poverty, that you had no people to take you in. And Thoreau had a very close knit family that was never far away. As for the pond itself, Thoreau loved to swim, boat, fish, And study it. It was sufficiently removed from the population concentration that he could experience intervals of solitude to the extent that he wanted, but proximate enough to the town so that he could get back there when he wanted.
And when he said, at one point in Walden where I lived was, it might have been as on another planet, or it might have been as far off as, uh, star that. astronomers look at. He was thinking about the solitude that's possible right beyond your elbows, and so it's in that kind of context, the context of what society's usual would have thought normal for a young man like Thoreau, and what Thoreau himself realized was possible in obtaining something like solitude and contemplation and connectivity with nature.
It is on Backyard, results in the sense of Vanessa romantic venture that you see in the text. And it was also a departure for him to move to Walden as he did when he did. It was a new departure in life, partly a stocktaking, a way of trying to figure out what that next stage of life was going to be. He was at a sort of crossroads, he felt.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, he's about 27 years old when he goes to Walden. That's right. That was in 1845. So we're describing an antebellum landscape. Most of the country still is wild. There are far more wild spaces than today. And what you describe, it sounds a lot like monasticism. It sounds like a monastic turn. And I'm curious how you think of the contemplative kind of life that he experienced around the pond and the kind of independence or self reliance or whether individualism is how you would describe this kind of monastic turn.
Because it's not a community monastery he joins. It's very much solitude that he pursues.
Lawrence Buell: That is right. He did have visitors. Maybe more visitors than people realize from reading the book, although there's a chapter on visitors, their prevailing emphasis is on solitude, is on retreat in his own pursuits and his own thoughts.
And as for monasticism, what the one man hermitage, he invites that too. And this was not simply a thought that's his alone, but the first piece of literature, you could call it. Written about Thoreau's experiment was by his friend and sometime walking companion, Ellery Channing, who wrote the first biography of Thoreau, that describes him as a holy hermit that Walden engaged in his contemplations, where with much piety he passes life, as the key line says.
And so it's not a stretch, I think, to look at Thoreau on one side of What he's thinking, doing, valuing, and aspiring to be with his world and experiment is. engaged in something like a monastic retreat. In more secular terms, there's a pretty good book about Thoreau that uses an Ericksonian paradigm of life stages to type the Walden experiment as a moratorium between, the moratorium word, between the education stage and the final life choice where.
You take stock of your values, of your direction, and draw into yourself
Evan Rosa: to learn how to move on. I'm mostly unfamiliar with that term of moratorium, but I do know that it's usually cast in adolescence. It's a sort of adolescent phase of exploration.
Lawrence Buell: Yeah. Well, you could say that Thoreau was, had a belated adolescence, and that in some ways makes him more like the 21st century youth with some security to backstop in.
than it does like a typical person of that stage of the 19th century.
Evan Rosa: Thoreau viewed the intellect as a cleaver. And to help understand Thoreau's thought, Larry breaks down four elemental principles that can help us get a hold of what Thoreau is all about.
Lawrence Buell: One is a neo stoic devotion to the simplification of the terms of existence. And with mindfulness that The ancients lived more simply than the modern, and with it a kind of moral perfectionism. That includes, uh, striving for, for bodily wellness, perfection at that level, as well as the purification of the mind.
The second would be, uh, what I'd call transcendentalist mysticism, and I've alluded to that already. Uh, the idea of a divinity within the infinitude of the private man and with it divinity of, of nature, the, um, sense of. the divine as duly situated within the human self and within the natural world. Third, devotion to the conscience or inner law as a moral touchstone more authoritative than official authority of state and church or of social consensus.
And that comes out very explicitly in Civil Disobedience. It does in Walden too, but especially there. And then finally, uh, Soros, an early example of the persuasion that we now gesture at calling spiritual, but not religious. There is an irreducible and animating spirituality to Thoreau, I believe that very strongly, that is not associated with adherence to any particular faith tradition, although you can find residues of the latter, of his Christian tradition.
background, Protestant Christian background, uh, and we can talk about that. So he has, with respect to his religious orientation, a kind of syncretic interest in world religions generally, particularly, uh, Hinduism and Buddhism. which he knew the best, spottily, but the best. And at the same time, an ethnographic detachment from all forms of religio tribalism, including Christianity, often including especially Christianity, because that was a nearby brand that he could see in action every day.
So in that spot between spirituality, free floating, and Religious practice connected with, uh, any one tribe, we locate Henry David, then. more towards the free floating spirituality that is unconnected with a particular faith practice, but can be understood only if we contrast it with what's happening out there in the larger scene of 19th century religious history.
So, there, neo Stoicism, transcendentalist mysticism, the authority of conscience or the higher law within the soul, and a spirituality that's not, quote, religious. Those are ways that I would define Thoreau's bedrock principles.
Evan Rosa: So maybe we should start with Neo Stoicism and this desire to live more simply. There's a kind of nostalgic feeling there perhaps. People of times past, they had it right. They lived more simply and their pursuit of life. If only we could go back to that kind of simplicity and escape the chaotic, frenetic buzz of the world that we're a part of.
Lawrence Buell: Yes. Well, to me, some of that aspiration is embedded in one of the passages, the so called Higher Laws chapter of Walden. It has some surprising twists and turns, because it looks misleadingly like that. I think, as if it might be turning its back on nature. And how can that be? Because we think of Thoreau as a kind of nature boy, great god pant, but here it goes.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbered. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own, that we may be well, yet not pure.
The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog with white and sound teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity, that in which men differ from brute beasts as mensches. The Chinese Confucian philosopher, is a thing very inconsiderable.
The common herd lose it very soon. Superior men preserve it carefully. Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity. If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity, I would go to seek him forthwith. A command over our passion and over the external senses of the body and good acts are declared by the Vita.
To be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God, that's a quote from Hindu scripture. Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body and transmute what in form is the gross sensuality into purity and devotion. And he goes on in that vein, but I think I'll stop and just say the following, which is that it's no accident that as he thinks about Purity of aspiration.
Make ourselves, our minds, and our body as pure as possible. He turns to ancient sources, so he's re trying to think of reorienting the self along the axis of ancient lines that disclose, um, eternal, uh, simplicities that if we act on them, uh, we can hope to purify our, ourselves and our lives. So here we've got That's what I call neo Stoic devotion to simplification and moral perfection, even if it is seemingly at the cost of the nature worship that we also associate with Thoreau.
Well, the fact is that at this juncture, when he's talking about overcoming nature, he's talking about uncontrolled sensuality in humans that he never ascribes really to the natural world itself. And bringing in the jawbone of the hog is a kind of tongue in cheek thing to do more than it is a serious statement about the natural world being lamentably tooth and claw the way that certain Winnians or I'm
Evan Rosa: very curious about a few sentences just past where you stopped, starting with the generative energy and through to this idea of God as the channel of purity.
Yes. Would you read that and then comment? I sure would. Yes.
Lawrence Buell: The generative energy, which when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean. When we are continent, invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man, and what are called genius, heroism, holiness, and the like are but various fruits which succeeded.
Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is opened. By turns, our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day. and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature with which he is allied.
I fear we are such gods or demigods only as swans and satyrs. The divine lied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
Evan Rosa: Wow. I mean, I just want to point out the description of that as a sort of, well, I feel like it's a little bit Gnostic. It is. Like it's, and maybe not just a little bit, it's fascinating how he is identifying sensuality as the source of, Yale Divinity School, Volf, Miroslav, Moltmann, faithy.
edu, Croasmun.
Lawrence Buell: Most readers have trouble with this passage, which is partly why I wanted to have us discuss it. It looks like a Victorian crudery, although we know that the Victorians were not as prudent as we thought. Yeah, I think this is one of these places where the, the monkish aspiration in the highest sense of the term gets expressed in thorough.
He has an earnest desire for purification of life of the soul. And this is one of the touchstone passages in his published work where he
Evan Rosa: expresses that. I want to also make reference to Augustine. I mean, it really smacks of St. Augustine in his desire for continence and his finding salvation through continence.
Lawrence Buell: That's true. That's true. It, uh, it, uh, comes out big time in the confessions. Augustine had, the history of sexual activity that, We don't think Thoreau probably had, but I think the key thing was that he was increasingly a convicted celibate, and it comes out, uh, a beautiful metaphor at the end of the first chapter of Walden, the first long chapter of the economy.
where he compares himself to, using a passage from Persian poetry, the azad, the solitary tree freestanding like the cypress. So here is a case where the spiritual impulse to perfection is expressed in a natural metaphor instead of in a sense of contrast between the natural and the spiritual. And actually that ending to economy is.
really more characteristic of the way he thinks about spiritual perfection, clothing it in nature speak, than the stoilistic language in the passage that they quoted.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you could connect it to this second principle that you wanted to draw out, transcendentalist mysticism. Yes. Um, it's very present here.
It seems in this very passage and perhaps connected. I mean, in fact, this chastity is is about being a channel to God.
Lawrence Buell: Yes, the transcendentalists were believers in the God within, the divinity within, yes, and thereby in a kind of unchurched spirituality that seeks its fulfillment, its most authentic expression in pursuits like what Walden prevailingly describes, the retreat.
into contemplation as against the daily activities of the social arena. So yes, that's a hinge between this passage and the second principle that I
Evan Rosa: express. But it also seems to allow for, I mean, you, you described not just the divinity within, but, um, a mysticism that understands the divinity of nature.
And this offers an opportunity to press back against that Gnostic compulsion, perhaps that it's through our bodies. that we encounter nature, that we are embedded within nature and some of the description of Thoreau as being so particularly interested in sort of elevating even the most mundane and beyond mundane kind of utterly particular elements of the pond, whether it's a leaf or the squelch of mud beneath his shoe or the glimmer of a reflection off the water, that there's a kind of connection he's seeking to nature.
Lawrence Buell: Yes. Uh, and actually, as this sequence, I've quoted in part, goes on to disclose, Thoreau is not trying to put the body or the senses behind so much as to transfigure them, including the very humblest functions of the body, into something contra popular assumption itself, spiritually pure. And so, there's a side of how this passage plays out, asserts everything in the body is potentially holy, and the kind of micro attentiveness to the natural world, including a very strong element of sensuous responsiveness.
When he writes about walking in his great essay of that title, and elsewhere, the same kind of experience of moving through nature. praises the idea of a purely sensuous existence, where all the senses are attuned, and in his descriptions of nature, increasingly, you see visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, All the five senses engaged.
And this in contrast to his mentor Emerson, for whom vision is the overriding sense, period. And Emerson credits him, Thoreau, with that expanded sensitivity, and the funeral, I should have said before, that Thoreau saw with all his senses, and was just remarkably attuned that way. That expanded sensorium, compared to the way that most people trot obliviously on their conservation walks with their dog or whatever, makes it so that he notices things that most people don't, even those that are going to nature to study it.
in one way or another, professionally. So yeah, the sense of an awakened sensorium, something that we see on display in Thoreau increasingly, and a sensitivity to nature's motions that has to do with sound as well as sight, with taste and smell, that too. Really quite wonderful.
Evan Rosa: And you point out his turn toward science, his turn toward botany as a, the natural end of this kind of sensorial attentiveness and
Lawrence Buell: attunement.
A particular kind of turn, though. He says in late life that, um, he never studied botany. It was, in other words, more through immersion that he learned than through book knowledge. Now, that's a little misleading in the sense that he did. I do a lot of reading in that and other science fields, but it's the truth, in the sense of what drew him and kept him close to those interests always was immersive, as he puts it in another way, it's a beautiful metaphor, I wanted to know my neighbors, meaning my non human neighbors, meaning not just critters, plants, life form, any life form.
And if he discovers a new one, one that he hadn't seen before, he's completely delighted by it. It fills his universe for the moment, whether it's a plant, whether it's a fish. So it's as if the demography of Concord has expanded suddenly. So this is, The word biodiversity doesn't exist in those days, but that's just the affect of biodiversity, the experience of it that excites him.
I feel like
Evan Rosa: I'd be remiss if at this point in the conversation, I didn't at least acknowledge in your work in ecology and environmentalism, that you spent a lot of time thinking about that. I'm wondering, What would you say about the implications of this aspect of Thoreau and how it lands to you, given the current climate crisis, given the environmental tasks before us, or I should say the environmental realities before us?
Lawrence Buell: Well, I think we owe a lot to Thoreau, indirectly, if not directly. Thoreau is not only the father of modern nature writing, but inspiration behind preservationist and conservationist movements a generation later, and a go to place today for researchers who are doing climate change. His journalist, a storehouse of information that helps demonstrate the changes in seasonality that happened as climate has warmed.
He himself, interestingly, realized that the local climate had been warming. He got this from really focused sources that included old settlers and descendants of original inhabitants, but he didn't, he didn't have the tools to understand what the dynamics of this was. And of course, the acceleration didn't take place big time until.
The 20th century. So in all these ways, I think Doro looms behind this, historically behind this as an inspiring figure.
Evan Rosa: Please correct me on the history if I've got this wrong, that one day during his stay at Walden, he goes for a walk and ends up in jail. And I wonder if you just sort of tell that story as a, an entree to his famous essay, Civil Disobedience.
Lawrence Buell: It's about halfway through the Walden Experience, he goes to town, as he does fairly frequently, for one reason or another, to have his shoe repaired, so he says, and he's arrested by the tax collector, who's acquaintance of his, for non payment of his poll tax, P O L L, a poll tax is a tax per head on adult males, age, Uh, pays for certain expenses of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and as a matter of principle, I think somewhat influenced by his friend Bronson Alcott, an elder transcendentalist who had done the same tax refusal a few years back, Thoreau refused to pay it, and so he got jailed.
He got jailed for only one night. And somebody, we think one of his elderly aunts, paid the tax, and he left, perhaps not happily, perhaps he would have preferred to be incarcerated a longer period of time in order to make more of a statement about it. But the key thing is not so much the experience itself, it's what he did of it, in words, that he wrote it up as first a public lecture, and then as he.
Great essay, Civil Disobedience. Its original title was different. Its original title, it floated about a bit, but the first published title was Resistance to Civil Government. And Civil Disobedience was the title that, uh, the slightly revised edition that came out a little after its death. And that's what Gandhi and Tolstoy and Martin Luther King So, in it, he makes a lot out of the potential huge significance of a small thing, the confrontation between an individual and an arm of the state over an issue that, however, is a complex of issues, is of great public importance.
So, in this small world of Concord and his own minor infraction. He sees some hugely important principles at work and that's what civil disobedience is all about. I mean,
Evan Rosa: is it true that it was over slavery? And was his abolitionism the motivating factor for his disobedience in this case?
Lawrence Buell: He claimed so, and I see no reason to believe otherwise.
Also historically true that the poll tax was not directly used to support the then ongoing war against Mexico. That was a war to extend slavery. And that The sources of support from the state of Massachusetts for that war, human volunteers and monetary ties to the federal government, they didn't come from the poll tax.
So that in that sense, which is just halfway conceded in the essay, Civil Disobedience, he was barking up the wrong tree when he, by non payment of that particular text. But as he said, it was his way of staging the confrontation between the, the embattled citizen and the forces of government. making a statement that one should not feel one has every right to disengage from the state if the state misbehaves.
And so I think overall it's barking up the wrong tree to press too hard on the point that the specific tax that he was not paying is a less good example of state support for this very unpopular war among people. anti slavery people it might have been. It's what, it's the occasion that he had to be able to make his case.
Evan Rosa: Here's Larry reading from Thoreau's classic essay that inspired many 20th century non violent resistors and moral reformers, Civil Disobedience.
Lawrence Buell: It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong. He may still properly have other concerns to engage in.
But it is his duty, at least, to wash his hand to it, and if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. Unjust laws exist. Shall we be content to obey them? Or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded? Or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them.
They think that if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is heard?
Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert, to point out its fault, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
Gets a little over the top at the end, but Literary hyperbole. Yes. Yes. Well, Washington Franklin is rebels goes back to the right of revolution and the spirit of 1776, doesn't it?
Evan Rosa: Sure.
Lawrence Buell: And
Evan Rosa: yet there is a
Lawrence Buell: point
Evan Rosa: that there is a point here and there's a, it's a point about power and the ability of the state as a vehicle of power to ever hear something like a moral minority.
Lawrence Buell: Absolutely. And it's. Also an assertion that we can't let ourselves off the hook.
Evan Rosa: Exactly. We
Lawrence Buell: can't be notionally opposed to something and not somehow act upon it.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. It's duty at least to wash his hands of it and not give practically his support. I mean, like, and so this requires a kind of, I mean, to borrow from your title, thinking disobediently.
I mean, this is right square in that line of thinking.
Lawrence Buell: Absolutely. And if you don't disobediently, it's all the more easy to get rolled. The key for Thoreau in this essay to why the state is able to use people for instrumentals, soldiers to fight, fellow travelers to pay their taxes or ensure that business as usual is maintained.
Or slaves to run the economy. Or slaves to run the economy, all those things. It's, it's that. People let themselves get rolled and consult their consciences. If you consult your conscience, then you're put into a kind of crisis. that can only be resolved if you satisfy yourself that you're not being yourself complicit.
This, uh, state power that's jumped the rails and gone wrong.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Does this encourage a kind of enclavism, a kind of removal or like escapism?
Lawrence Buell: It could, it could. And I think it's no accident that the way that Gandhi and King, who are both inspired by Thoreau, put civil disobedience into action was by creating disciplined cadres of people, a cohort who would collectively school themselves in the principles of non violent direct action.
They're very mindful. You can't do it alone and there is a kind of trust in the importance of doing it alone in civil disobedience that one could question. Thoreau's, uh, quite, I think, hopeful, maybe over optimistic that freestanding examples of disobedience, like what he is trying to model here rhetorically, uh, will have a ripple effect.
And in a certain sense, he's right. The, the theory of civil disobedience, uh. Thoreau articulates here was not by any means just Thoreau, primarily thanks to him, increasingly adopted as the anti slavery movement became more radical. in the run up to the Civil War. And I think that's one of the reasons why Thoreau had such a high opinion of John Brown, a great hero of his, the guerrilla chief that really precipitated, helped precipitate the war, um, the Harper's Ferry Raid and his martyrdom.
Evan Rosa: What do you think is the lasting impact of Thoreau on thinking disobediently as a representative of thinking disobediently? If you were say to kind of commend it to a young person today in a similar kind of moratorium period, in a similar kind of timeout moment, what kind of lasting impact can you commend?
Lawrence Buell: Thoreau's a wonderful spokesman for the hazards of relying on the wisdom of elders and the need to check yourself for how much of your thinking as usual is an implant. from your tribe, your family, your community, and do so in the assumption that you need to self correct against that and strike out in your own way.
And further, that what seems to be the social consensus of any given epoch, like the one you live in, is always to be questioned before you decide to go with it. If you don't question it, you're going to be like the fish swimming in a fluid that you have no way of knowing is healthful or poisonous until you die.
So to maintain habits of skepticism, interrogation, maybe not to the point of pig headedness, the way that It seems as Emerson is twitting in his funeral address, his first instinct upon hearing a proposition was to controversy, to develop the settled habit of Not acquiescing to what you hear when you're listening to some line of doctrine or argument that's new to you, or maybe seductive to one part of you, but always maintain a kind of critical detachment on everything.
That's kind of boiling down thorough to assertive. Easy recipe, I think, the habit of thinking disobediently. It's not easy to, it's particularly not easy to think disobediently if you're, uh, in a club or in a company of peers that, uh, you like, that are edging things in a way that, if you think about it, are going to be discomfort, uncomfortable to you and, and that you really oppose.
It's not easy to think disobediently when you're a part of a loving family that has expectations for you. You don't feel you're quite shitted for, and yet you don't want to disappoint them. It's not easy to think disobediently when you're in school and you're in a classroom that is being dominated by a powerful instructor that other students feel like.
has charisma and they're sort of wowed by, but there's something about that, that doesn't quite sit for you. Um, in all those cases, a dose of Theropian disaffection and dissent can stand a person in good stead, not just the young person, but the person at any age, I think, out of the constructively and fruitfully irreverent and escape from the traps that Otherwise would ensnare you and at the same time avoid an extreme of perversity, just opposition for opposition's sake.
That's the question and I think I'm characterizing the way that Thoreau thought about his own situation as well as Good marching orders for life.
Evan Rosa: Larry, thank you so much for painting the picture of Thoreau that you have, uh, in your book. He's a, he remains a figure that is inspiring to younger generations. And as you say, all generations. And. He's just a fascinating American persona. Thank you so much for joining me on For the Life of the World.
You're very welcome, Evan. All the best to you. Take care.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Lawrence Buell on the thought of Henry David Thoreau. Production assistance by Zoë Halaban, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show.
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