On Walden Pond-With The
Bicentennial (2017) Of The Birth Of Henry David Thoreau In Mind
By Fritz Taylor
Henry David Thoreau
would have flipped out or went wiggy or whatever word they used back in
pre-Civil War (ante bellum okay) times in the Transcendental world around
Brattle Street in Cambridge and the wilds of Concord to express bafflement at
something weird. Now when you put Concord and Henry David Thoreau together what
naturally comes to mind is his little year of living dangerously out on
secluded, solitude-fraught Walden Pond far from the demons of civilization.
Here’s why he our boy
H.D. would have flipped out. Once the moderator of this site, this American Left History blog, Peter Paul
Markin asked me to make some comments on the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth I
decided since I only lived about twenty miles from Walden Pond to go visit the
place in order to maybe soak up a little of what H.D. got out of that
experience in solitude. Unfortunately I had to go on a weekend, on a hot get
out of the city to the cool waters of anywhere weekend. Forget it, forget I
ever even thought of going to that hallowed ground under such circumstances.
The crowds, the cars hunkering down to get into the limited spaces available to
park were so overwhelmingly huge that I never got to the pond that day. What I
did get for my efforts was about two hours of waiting in Route 2 traffic trying
to get away from the freaking place that I could never get into. So you can see
what quiet as a mouse, be at one with nature, commune with the gods Thoreau
would have freaked out, gone wiggy, whatever if he had had to tangle with that
craziness. The boats, the rubber tubes, the shovels and pails, the twenty-seven
varieties of picnic lunches made from processed materials would have driven him
to McLean’s Hospital, the hot spot for those who could not face the real world
after having been through some mill. If that oasis had been open during his
time which I will check on. (Okay yes it was founded in 1811 so he could have
deposited himself there.)
Of course a guy like
Thoreau, an old Brahmin, old Puritan stock guy was more than just a nature lover,
a scientist, an artist a writer, a diarist and that is really what I want to
talk about today, about that whole business of civil disobedience, of active
political opposition to the wrongs of the day with which we also associate his
name. And maybe just maybe make a point that might be germane today even for
those who are clueless about what H.D. was trying to do back in the day, back
in Jimmy Polk’s “little war” days with the brethren down in sunny Mexico when
that benighted country was infinitely larger than it is today before the greedy
United States made many Mexicans strangers in their own lands.
As usual with acts of
civil disobedience it is not the theory or philosophy behind your action that
gets the play but that you have violated some law, have made yourself criminal before
sober society whatever your motivation. And it is not always some great
conscious deed (or misdeed) that creates your action. Thoreau had not paid his
poll tax in a number of years (a tax which you had to pay in order to vote in
whatever elections were upcoming. A tax which among other sources of revenue was
used to keep up local government and was then used to keep the riffraff from
being able to vote, even poor white males since women and blacks could not vote
at the time in any case. The poll tax would be one of the devises that Mister
James Crow’s hirelings would use down in the Southern United States after the
Civil War and Reconstruction ran their courses in order to keep blacks from
voting so it has a very long and discriminatory history).
Here is where chance
comes into play. He ran into the poll tax collector who ordered him to pay up.
H.D. refused citing the then current war with Mexico which he opposed (along
with others like the young Abraham Lincoln) as just another grab by the
politically dominant Southerners for more land to expand their land-hungry
slavery system on. The war and his opposition to slavery landed him in jail for
non-payment. He spent a night in the local jail before some sympathizer sprung him.
Neither the actual law
broken nor the criminal penalty which in H.D.’s case was minimal is what made
his action the subject of future interest to people like me when I got “religion”
on the questions of war and peace in my time after my military duty in Vietnam
led me away from dumb-founded support for that damn war. The point was, is to
take his example and that of plenty of others since most famously in my generation
actions like the priest brothers, the Berrigans, Dan and Phil, and their co-thinkers
in the anti-draft resistance movement of the 1960s and commit acts of resistance
against injustice and unjust governments. No question it is a tough and
agonizing dollar to contemplate such actions but may I be so bold as to argue that
these benighted times we live in, these “cold civil war” times, have put Henry
David Thoreau’s ideas on the front burner. Thanks H.D.
(By the way on that
writer aspect of his life mentioned above
the New York Review of Books
through its publication house has just put out a one volume selection of his
journals in honor of the bicentennial. Amazingly the whole work product was two
million words so reducing to one volume at maybe 200,000 words was a real
achievement. H.D. was a mad monk for words no question just like two million
word Jack Kerouac was in the 20th century.)
