Henry David Thoreau

Destination: Concord, Massachusetts

Site: Henry David Thoreau’s Home

“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?“

So wrote American writer Henry David Thoreau one and a half centuries ago. Sounds like a bumper sticker from the present day environmentalists, doesn’t it?  Good old Thoreau continues to prove himself way out in front of the curve.

Thoreau, whose Walden Pond also provided us documentation of an early version of staycation (shudder!) wrote, if not travel books, certainly books that invite exploration of a place.

Our Great American Road Trip visited Massachusetts two weeks ago, so when I got this letter in the mail from the Thoreau Farm Trust, I just had to share it with you.

The non-profit organization has rescued the American pioneering environmental writer’s birthplace from destruction.  In keeping with the man’s “green” principles, the house has been restored with sustainability as well as historic values. A neat trick, since the house was built in 1730.

Thoreau House

I  like the idea that instead of being just one more historic house in a state packed with them (Emerson, Alcott, Whittier, Emily Dickinson, Longfellow, etc.), the Trust is creating a place for people to learn about Thoreau’s environmental ideas and learn what they can do to make a “tolerable planet.”

If you would like to keep tabs on the project, learn more details, or support their work, go to the Thoreau Farm Trust web site.

To read more about some of the writers of Thoreau’s day and place, see this article by R. Todd Felton, and his second about New England writers,  and this one about Emily Dickinson.

Did you know that Thoreau’s house was being opened to the public? Will it be on your list of places to go?  Have you read Thoreau? Love him or not?

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The Old Manse

Perhaps the best way to understand Transcendentalism is to start where they did, in the study of an old minister’s house by a slow moving river in a town just nineteen  miles outside of Boston. It was there, in 1836, a young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, living in his grandfather’s house, wrote the book that became the foundation Transcendentalism, Nature.

In it, Emerson is clear about the benefits of leaving both the actual rooms in which we live and our set ways of thinking, and striding out into nature:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — a mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

It was in this passage from Nature that Transcendentalism first came alive for me, and I structured A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England around what I view as Transcendentalism’s central quest: to forge an original relationship with the universe or, as Emerson puts it, to behold “God and nature face to face.”

So, the question is how did this group of writers, philosophers, poets, activists and dreamers conduct their quests? Where did they go for that “face to face” interaction? How does one forge one’s own unique relationship with the universe?

Forging One’s Own Unique Relationship With the Universe

Obviously, they went to Concord. They went to visit and converse with Emerson. They came to walk the paths around the town and draw inspiration from nature. In Boston, Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore on West Street was another place they went to forge that relationship with the universe. They spent time here bouncing ideas off each other and searching for a better way before wandering up Tremont Street to School Street and the Old Corner Bookstore and the Parker House hotel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne went to Brook Farm and joined their utopian community in an unsuccessful effort to find his unique relationship. Bronson Alcott packed his family up and created Fruitlands utopian community just west of Concord in Harvard, Massachusetts…if only until winter came.

Emily Dickinson declined to travel much beyond her own home for God and the universe but found them among her garden plants and in the view from her second story room.

Perhaps the most well known method of forging an original relationship with the universe was the move to Walden Pond and attempt to “front only the essential facts of life” as Thoreau did from 1845 to 1847. His experiment in living the Transcendentalist quest, along with the record of it we know as Walden, has had perhaps the greatest impact of any of the Transcendentalist writings.

A Lake in the Woods

Perhaps there is no more telling example of the Transcendentalist legacy than the two square miles of Massachusetts surrounding and including Walden Pond. The lake itself and its shoreline are now part of a state reservation, with the Thoreau Institute tucked up among the woods south of the lake. Beyond that, the land is a patchwork of protected land, open fields and development. However, that is not to say that all is idyllic and tranquil. Route 2, Massachusetts’ main east/west thoroughfare north of the turnpike runs its four lanes of traffic less than a quarter mile from the site of Thoreau’s cabin. The exceedingly popular public beach at Walden Pond can see nearly a million visitors a year, only a fraction of whom are there because of Thoreau.

In sum, Walden Pond is an amalgamation of homage to Thoreau and his legacy; a beloved and much used natural place for swimming, fishing, and hiking; and a cautionary tale of shortsighted regional and urban planning. The same can be said for much of New England in general.

Transcendentalism Today

Transcendentalism has perhaps fared much better than the landscape which inspired it. While its heady ideas and radical philosophies seemed less thrilling as the industrial age got fully under way and many of its leading lights faded and died, Transcendentalism’s inherent optimism, recognition of our interconnectedness, and deeply-held appreciation of the natural world holds as true today as they did when Emerson first put pen to paper.

In fact (in a rough segue), one can still go to hear about Transcendentalism. I will be speaking at the All Souls Church in Manhattan this coming Thursday, February 26 about the Transcendentalists and my book, A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England. For more information about the event at All Souls Church and some of my other events, you can go to my Red Room page. I hope you will join me. If you can’t make it, please feel free to leave a comment here on my blog, Open Page – Open Road.

Thanks,

R. Todd

All the images seen here belong to R. Todd Felton.

NOTE: DO NOT FORGET. LEAVE A COMMENT HERE OR ON TOMORROW’S POST BY R. T. FELTON, AND YOU COULD WIN A COPY OF HIS “WALKING BOSTON.”

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.