Almost everyone who visited me in Lincoln came to the Walden Pond State Reservation expecting to find unspoiled nature and the story of a man who sought in its bosom the inspiration and strength to fight injustice. They were never disappointed. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation maintains a life-size replica of Thoreau’s sparsely furnished cabin next to the parking lot so that visitors can see how serious he was in his determination to live a “primitive and frontier life.” There are maps posted that direct tourists to the original “site of Thoreau’s hut” and a well-maintained path that takes them there. When they arrive at the granite posts that mark the site, there is a sign quoting Thoreau’s assertion in Walden that he went to the woods to live “deliberately.” Visitors are encouraged to commit themselves to a similarly deliberate life by leaving a stone on the cairn started near the cabin’s location shortly after Thoreau’s death. Nothing distracts from the sense that one is making a sacred pilgrimage and that the pilgrimage is all about Henry David Thoreau. Clearly the Commonwealth of Massachusetts takes very seriously the terms of the gift that resulted in the creation of the reservation. In 1922, when private citizens granted eighty acres of Walden Woods to the state, they did so with the stipulation that it “preserve the Walden of Emerson and Thoreau.” Their version of Walden did not include the ghosts that once troubled Mary Minot. Concord’s slaves and former slaves were replaced by a minuteman at one end of town and a dedicated abolitionist at the other. In retrospect, it hardly seems surprising that I knew nothing about Concord’s slavery past until years later, after I had moved away.

    Because I assumed I knew what lay between the book’s covers, I did not actually read Walden until I took a graduate course on American literature. I had made so many visits over the years to Walden Woods, I knew by heart each of its signs as well as the pamphlets distributed there by the state. I was thus very familiar with Thoreau’s account of why he determined to live for two years in a tiny cabin he built on the fringes of his hometown. “I wished to live deliberately,” he explains, “to front 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 thought I knew, too, what Thoreau discovered during his experiment in subsistence living. My parents had a quotation from Walden hanging in our front hall exhorting my brother and me to reach for the proverbial stars: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet
with a success unexpected in common hours.”

    Lifted out of context, as these quotations so often are on coffee mugs, calendars, bumper stickers, signs and posters, they had become platitudes. What I discovered upon reading Walden was anything but. Thoreau had a wonderful way of looking at a world he scrutinized carefully. Everything he observed was a metaphor awaiting his unique interpretation. In one example I particularly love, Thoreau describes a bug that “came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years.” It seems
an egg had been “deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it.” “Hatched perchance by the heat of an urn,” the bug was heard “gnawing out for several weeks.” Thoreau uses the story as an occasion to hope for the transformation of humankind.“ Who knows what
beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society . . .may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer day at last!”