I ’m seventy—old enough to retire. If only I had a job to retire from. I used to be self-employed; now I’m self-unemployed. Looking back at my life, I wonder why I never achieved “success.” I had a strong start: president of my sixth-grade intellectually gifted class at PS 152 in Manhattan. My destiny was clearly to be a doctor, lawyer, or master of finance. What happened?
The same year I was class president, I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Thus began a lifetime love affair with simplicity and poverty.
Thoreau undertook what he called an “experiment” in solitude in 1845: he built a small cottage in the woods near Walden Pond in Massachusetts and set out to live sustainably by himself. Once, every man knew how to build a house. Now he knows how to order jeans online.
In sixth grade I was impressed with Thoreau’s precise budget for constructing his dwelling: $28.12 ½. I vividly remember that half cent.
Thoreau lived beside Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days. The journal he wrote during his time there became Walden. It contains such thoughts as:
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Thoreau looked at a telegraph cable and prophesied the internet.
After I finished Walden, my dad asked, “What did Thoreau think of people?”
“I think he liked them,” I said.
“He thought they were strange,” my father corrected me.
My dad feared that if I admired Thoreau too deeply, I would go down the path of lonely mysticism—which I did.
Thoreau had Walden Pond. I have the Esopus Creek rushing through the woods behind my house in Phoenicia, New York. In the evenings I listen to music. In the mornings I listen to my creek chuckling.
In nineteenth-century England the intellectuals were aristocrats, but in the US they were people who learned to live frugally, like Johnny Appleseed and Thoreau. What took great wealth in Europe here required only intelligent poverty.
My wife graduated from Dartmouth, and I went to Cornell. (Technically I flunked out of Cornell, but I’m still an alumnus.) We are probably the least successful Ivy League couple on earth—in purely financial terms, that is.
Come to think of it, Thoreau was also an impecunious Ivy Leaguer. He attended Harvard and graduated nineteenth in his class of forty-seven.
Thoreau was part of a movement called Transcendentalism, which emerged around the poet-philosopher and Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson. But while Emerson would rhapsodize about the Over-soul, Thoreau was allergic to abstractions, writing:
I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.
Emerson was a professional philosopher; Thoreau was an amateur. That’s why I prefer the writings of Henry David.
The Esopus at dawn is a dull, flat, glowering gray: the color of an old knife.
While I was pouring millet from a bag into a bottle this morning, sixteen grains fell on the table. One by one I picked them up. Was it obsessiveness that drove me to do this, or a sense of economy, or a love for each grain of millet on earth? I’m not sure, but it was a Thoreauvian moment. In 2017 I went to “This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan. There I saw Thoreau’s well-worn copy of the Bhagavad Gita. Like me, Thoreau was an American who wished he’d been born in Madras.
Thoreau’s literary career was essentially a series of failures, but he was content with it. This is another way we are alike. In 1856 he wrote to his friend Harrison Blake, “I never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbor’s eyes.”
Thoreau had a beard. So do I. Probably any man who spends enough time among mosses, grass, and bushes will eventually grow whiskers.
Perhaps I should change my name to “Sparreau.”
Today I was strolling along the Esopus Creek, walking at the same rate of speed as the creek was flowing. The waters were heading to the sea; I was walking a few hundred feet and turning around.
That’s the difference between a creek and a person. A person can turn around.
Thoreau was arguably the original hippie: he dropped out of society, worked as little as possible, spent almost no money, and liked to sit beside a pond playing the flute. But while hippies enjoyed colorful orgies and loud music, Thoreau disliked sex, drugs, and rock and roll—the 1841 version of which was likely a rowdy strain of proto-bluegrass.
In short, Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am.
The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.
Acorns are falling. As I walk on the sand across the street, the oak seeds mildly distress my bare feet. It’s also grasshopper season. Hundreds of them live in the strip of grass next to my driveway. As I walk along, they leap—out of terror or joy, I can’t tell.
Educated Americans of all eras have been agents of gentrification. As a surveyor Thoreau helped divide virgin land into subdivisions for developers. To make money, he betrayed his most cherished beliefs—like most of us.
Emerson wrote about Thoreau:
Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave shrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or squirrel’s nest.
Thoreau was also remarkably short. After he became famous, many who met him were struck by his stumpiness (though I cannot locate an exact measure of his height). Maybe that’s why Thoreau loved nature: he was literally close to the earth.
From reading the chronology in the back of the Library of America edition of his works, I learned that Thoreau, like me, lived for a time in New York City! “It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined,” he wrote of that place.
OK, he lived on Staten Island.
The beech trees behind my house are turning yellow. All the ferns are drooping, a tragic brown. Leaves are not yet falling, but they’re imagining themselves falling.
My autumnal hobby is trying to catch a falling leaf. It’s much more difficult than it sounds. Leaves seem to be falling all the time, but when you wait under a tree for one, none will budge. Then, when they do descend, they’re much faster than you think—and fall in unpredictable loops. I don’t want to dislocate my shoulder diving for a yellow leaf, like an outfielder snagging a fly ball.
This explains why, so far, I haven’t caught one.
Rereading this, I fear I may have misrepresented myself as some sort of Zen ascetic. In fact, I spend vast stretches of time watching Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube, surfing Twitter (now X), and talking for hours to anyone who has the misfortune to call me on the phone. My life, like that of most inhabitants of the twenty-first century, is a parade of joyless distractions.
Thoreau also conveniently left out of Walden the many dinners he had at Emerson’s house, and that he visited his mother every week so she could do his laundry.
My dentist, Bruce Milner, is a former member of the band Every Mother’s Son, whose song “Come On Down to My Boat” reached number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967. There’s a keyboard in his waiting room, and in between patients Bruce likes to play a song or two. One of his favorite numbers is “Different Drum,” Linda Ronstadt’s first hit with the Stone Poneys. The song’s title comes from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
The name of Bruce’s practice: Transcend Dental.
We tend to think of Thoreau as a hermit, but, in fact, he was deeply involved in politics. He refused to pay a poll tax that would support slavery and the Mexican War, and he went to jail for it (for one night). A few years after that, he wrote the essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau was active in the Underground Railroad and supported John Brown’s slave insurrection. He was that rare combination of nature mystic and violent revolutionary.
People used to take down their flags at the end of each day, but they don’t anymore. Millions of US flags fly in the American darkness.
How nice it would be to hang a flag from a tree branch, rather than a flagpole—to include nature in one’s patriotism!
One way that I’m decidedly unlike Thoreau is that I can barely remember the name of a single plant. My wife will tell me forty times, “This is dogbane,” and each time, the knowledge will drift away like chimney smoke in an April sky.
I do like walking on pine needles, however, because they’re soft and aromatic and feel sacred. Maple leaves have a distinctive shape, which strangely resembles a map of North America. I know what a dragonfly looks like, and a lightning bug. But a clever five-year-old could probably outperform me in nature lore.
Thoreau wrote more books than people realize. In addition to his big hit there were A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. But he never, to my knowledge, wrote fiction.
What would a Thoreau novel be like? I picture two muskrats as protagonists—plus their friend, a possum.
He also wrote poetry, but he burned a bunch of his poems in response to Emerson’s scathing critique. Indeed, some of Thoreau’s surviving verse is almost laughably bad. He was particularly talentless at rhyming. Here’s a fascinatingly awful couplet from the poem “Conscience”: “I love a life whose plot is simple, / And does not thicken with every pimple.”
Thoreau was a poet, but his real poem was his life.
I almost caught a leaf today. I had folded my arms, and the leaf fell into them, but when I opened them, it was gone. Leaves are tricky!
What about a leaf on the ground that’s lifted by the wind—would that count if I caught it? This has never happened to me, but I often wonder about it.
I would say such a catch is valid but inferior to snaring a virgin leaf.
Catching autumn leaves in the autumn air is something Thoreau might actually have done.
For a long time I thought Thoreau’s last words were “Moose . . . Indians.” Yet, to my shock, I discovered recently those weren’t his last words. He said those words to Amos Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing two days before he died.
His last words were to his sister Sophia as she read to him from his account of his river voyage with his brother, John: she heard him say, “Now comes good sailing.”
Sophia said his mind was clear until the end. In his last weeks, when his orthodox aunt Louisa asked, “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” he answered pleasantly, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.”
I should have read all two million words of Thoreau’s journals by now. But I am lazy, so I haven’t.
Instead I read the Esopus Creek, whose pages are constantly turning, even without a wind.
Like Thoreau, I have endeavored, somewhat imperfectly, to avoid cooperating with evil. Henry David refused to pay taxes for the Mexican War; I avoided paying taxes for the Vietnam War by living on a tiny salary. (Below a certain adjusted gross income, one pays zero taxes.) After a few years, however, I couldn’t live so cheaply, so I began allocating 35 percent of my tax bill—the percentage that supported the military—to a group called the World Peace Tax Fund. That money was held in escrow until a bill could be passed in Congress allowing pacifists to legally assign their taxes to nondestructive aims. Every year the IRS would send me a letter detailing the amount I owed and threatening to send me to prison for five years. While I was traveling the world in the 1980s, my parents received the letters and paid my debt.
The World Peace Tax Fund bill never passed, but my $1,277 remains in an account with the New England War Tax Resistance group in Thoreau’s home state of Massachusetts. The interest from these funds nourishes progressive projects like Boston Liberation Health.
As I stood by the Esopus today, two black fighter planes, one after the other, flew low overhead, startling me with their roars. So powerful is the US military that one feels its might even in remote Phoenicia.
Life is complex. Thoreau lived alone in the woods, but his mother and sisters did his laundry. I live “below the radar,” but still benefit from US imperialism. I have lots of free time because other people are doing real work, unremitting toil for slave wages.
By standing under a black oak tree for seventeen minutes this morning, I was able to catch a leaf! My autumn is complete.
From Walden:
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
In a sense I am the sparrow perched on Thoreau’s shoulder.
