Essays of Henry D. Thoreau Book

Reading Thoreau is like taking a nice, long walk in the woods and then, halfway through, starting a big argument about politics.

Yes, his writings are more complex than that -- admittedly Thoreau's essays often intertwine politics and nature, and are neither wholly one or the other -- but to a layperson like me, that offers a reasonable enough description. And that description is not offered as a negative. We are political beasts, even when we think we aren't; "not-politics" is still a kind of politics, a fact that Thoreau sometimes overlooks in his nearly constant throat-clearing about how debasing politics is.

This collection of essays by Henry David Thoreau opens a window to another time and place -- the bustling, burgeoning but still mostly rural New England of the mid-Nineteenth Century, in an America still chained by the sin of chattel slavery. It is slavery that draws out Thoreau's politics most strongly, though he seems overly admiring of John Brown's dubious character (though perhaps rightly laudatory of his 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, an attempt to foment a slaver rebellion). Since John Brown's actions prior to Harper's Ferry do little to differentiate him from a modern terrorist -- i.e., killing innocents in the name of a religious cause -- I have to part company with Thoreau's near-idol worship of that man.

Rather, it's Thoreau's writings prior to 1859 that hold the most authority and grace. His essay on "Civil Disobedience" is well-known (and his arguments are closely examined even in our times, including a serious treatment by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice). Although Thoreau's argument doesn't necessarily support the type of nonviolent resistance many believe, it's clear that Thoreau provided a major source of inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi.

For a man who professed to despise politics, he seemed to possess a great gift for political invective, made abundantly clear in his sarcastic, hilarious, and brilliant "Slavery in Massachusetts" (just think about that title for a second) -- a damning attack on Northerners who profited from the raw materials provided by Southern slave labor and the complicity of the North in supporting the Fugitive Slave Law.

Elsewhere, Thoreau writes what might be called "poetry in prose," such as in "A Winter Walk," reading so evocative that it should be mandatory on Christmas mornings. Thoreau's descriptive ability is so engaging that reading him is like reading a painting. When it comes to his essays that focus mostly on nature, at times I found myself mesmerized, reading along and, without realizing it, becoming completely immersed, like I were actually standing there in a bucolic setting in 1843. It's clear why many still read Thoreau today.

Then there's the writing, nearly flawless, and which conveys hope and despair at once. I'll end on this sample from "Walking" -- another gem found in this highly recommended, but not necessarily easy-to-read, collection:

"We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, '' sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar."