![](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/walden.jpg\")
<\/a>A woodcut by Ethelbert White for a Penguin paperback edition of Walden<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
This July, as the festivities in honor of Thoreau\u2019s two-hundredth\u00a0birthday\u00a0commence, pilgrims will make their way to what\u2019s called the \u201cbirthing room\u201d on the second floor of the Thoreau Farm on Virginia Road at the outskirts of Concord. This is where a new species of American thinker was born. With its low ceiling, this quiet, well-ordered bedroom, painted in a soft sage, is a place that invites silent meditation. Thoreau would have appreciated the tranquility. But he also would have directed us to the attic above.<\/p>\n
The narrow wooden steps lead to an unfinished garret. The roof is pinned together with eighteenth-century pegs, shingled with modern nails that protrude through the roof. In the eaves are a dozen boxes, mementos from a century of worship at the altar of Thoreau. Postcards, publishing notices, news clippings, proceedings, and countless letters from Thoreau\u2019s anonymous readers. A woman from Cincinnati in 1947 writes a thank-you note to Thoreau\u2019s spirit: Walden<\/em> saved her life. A man from Ottawa sends his regards: Cape Cod<\/em> was a place of refuge in the aftermath of his wife\u2019s death. A seventh grader sends his capstone project: a geologically accurate map of the Thoreau\u2019s sauntering routes around Concord.<\/p>\n Many people might think that attic was full of junk; they\u2019d pitch everything in the trash and move on. But Thoreau would have us look again. So, the last time I was there, I did. Next to the map, wedged in all of this junk, were twenty-two mimeographed pages. On the top of the yellow packet were the words:\u00a0<\/p>\n COMMEMORATION OF THE HUNDREDTH It was the morning of May 11, 1962. A group had assembled at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. to remember Thoreau. One of the honored guests was an eighty-eight-year-old Robert Frost: exactly twice as old as Thoreau had been when he died. Frost would die nine months later, but not before he delivered his final tribute. It was, at one point, published in the Concord Saunterer<\/em>, the journal of the Thoreau Society, but since that point, more than fifty years ago, it has been largely forgotten. Many of the rarest things in life are, according to Thoreau, never adequately documented. At some point, someone had transcribed the event, perhaps in the hopes that the afternoon would not be completely lost. Frost begins:<\/p>\n One of the greatest books we have had in America\u2014and it will always be\u2014is Walden \u2026<\/p>\n Whenever I am weary of considerations\u2014there is a line of my poetry somewhere like that\u2014when I am weary of my considerations and I can not stand it any longer, I always say:<\/p>\n \u201cMe for the woods!\u201d<\/p>\n Somebody said I talk woods too much. The word \u201cwood\u201d means mad, you know, too. That is it. I want to go wild in the woods. I have been telling this story a long time. The first poem in my first book is the wish for wilderness where I can get really lost. I never got lost. Daniel Boone said he was never lost\u2014he had been bewildered; but I have not even been bewildered. I want to be where I can be bewildered\u2014lost\u2014not be able to find my way home. That is wilderness.<\/p>\n [Applause]\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I, too, wanted to applaud, but I also wanted to take Frost\u2019s advice: to get lost, to go elsewhere.<\/p>\n So I tried to track down a fellow philosopher who had \u201cleft philosophy.\u201d This term is a strange one. It means abandoning an academic discipline that often amounts to cloistering yourself in a library cubby, burying yourself in impenetrable texts, and eschewing human companionship and your natural environs. This is, among other reasons, why Thoreau and Emerson often did not want to be labeled \u201cphilosophers.\u201d \u201cLeaving philosophy\u201d is not an entirely bad idea\u2014it means returning to the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is Alejandro Strong, please leave a message\u201d\u2014I did. \u201cLet\u2019s go for a canoe.\u201d<\/p>\n Alejandro is a paddler. At the end of his dissertation he spent more time in the woods in Northern Maine than in the library. He barely finished. This is the guy Frost wanted to be. Alejandro has been\u2014and largely remains\u2014bewildered. Last year he started Apeiron Expeditions, a touring company that specializes in reading Thoreau in the woods. In true Thoreauvian style, Alejandro didn\u2019t advertise\u2014at all\u2014so it basically amounts to him traveling up and down the Penobscot with the few friends who were willing to read Walden<\/em>, and row and live deliberately for a week. Mostly he just mans the paddles by himself.<\/p>\n But now I wanted to join him, to see what would happen if we went to the woods together. Could we capture something of Frost\u2019s and Thoreau\u2019s wildness without killing it? \u201cIn wildness,\u201d Thoreau contended, \u201cis the preservation of the world\u201d\u2014but he isn\u2019t directing his readers to board a sparkling white ship on a pleasure voyage into the distant wilderness. \u201cHope and the future for me,\u201d Thoreau writes, \u201care not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.\u201d He believed that hope and the future would mean pitifully little if one were unwilling to risk the safety of the present. Getting swamped: losing control, losing yourself, and maybe recovering. That is what we would look for in Maine.<\/p>\n A woodcut by Ethelbert White for a Penguin paperback edition of Walden<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n When Thoreau first went to Maine, in 1846, traveling up the Penobscot River to the outer reaches of the state, it was, at least in part, in an attempt to \u201crough it,\u201d to see what he and a few close friends could handle in the face of nature, red in tooth and claw. He wanted to see what real hunting\u2014moose hunting\u2014was like. He discovered, rather unexpectedly, that it was revolting. He wanted to climb real mountains, like Mount Katahdin, which stands at 5,270 feet. But when he finally conquered the small monster, again it was more than he had bargained for. From the top, he wrote:<\/p>\n What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! \u2014 Think of our life in nature, \u2014 daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, \u2014 rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Many thinkers have gone to the woods in search of existential answers, but Thoreau seems to suggest nature usually, maybe always, thwarts these attempts. What we find in the woods are questions: Who are we? Where are we? I\u2019m often reminded of the scene from Goethe\u2019s Faust<\/em> in which Faust summons the Earth Spirit\u2014in the hope of mastering its existence\u2014and then cowers before it. Or Job being laid low by God\u2019s majesty. Sometimes self-exploration and self-assertion can tip precipitously into something else, into the willingness to surrender control. This is bewilderment.<\/p>\n Surrendering is harder than you might think. Most of modern life depends on keeping a tight grip on the reigns: going to work, making rent, getting married, staying married, having kids, raising kids. Thoreau didn\u2019t abide by any of these conventions particularly effectively (although the Emerson children adored him). His genius lay elsewhere, in the woods, in letting go. Being \u201cpossessed:\u201d the word comes from the Latin possidere<\/em>, \u201cto have and to hold.\u201d Thoreau entreats his readers to give themselves over and to allow themselves to be held. This is the opposite of \u201croughing it.\u201d In the 1840s, it was not unusual to find Thoreau in the woods outside of Concord literally hugging trees, or on his belly in the grass imitating a snake, or knee deep in a pool petting the fish. To onlookers this behavior looked insane\u2014in Frost\u2019s words, \u201cmad, you know.\u201d And maybe it was. Maybe Thoreau really lost his mind. But what did he find in the process?<\/p>\n I\u2019d written my book American Philosophy: A Love Story<\/em><\/a> in the nowhere of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I\u2019d gotten just a hint of what it meant to get lost. Hiking with Nietzsche,<\/em> a book on becoming who you are, was also written \u201caway,\u201d this time in the Alps. This second book, quite explicitly, is about the woods in Frost\u2019s sense of the word, about the possibilities of being possessed and being human. Thoreau reminds us that despite our civilized daily routines that \u201cthe savage in man is never quite eradicated.\u201d The real trick is to find a way to preserve it, or better, set it free.<\/p>\n So I called Alex back. This time he picked up. I beat around the bush for a minute, but then went straight in:<\/p>\n \u201cCan we go to the woods?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, sure. We can go in August. Bring the American Philosophy<\/em> book. We can read that. And Walden<\/em>. It\u2019ll probably just be us, but that\u2019s cool with me. Want to ask Doug?\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, yes I did. Doug Anderson taught Alejandro and me American philosophy. He has lived \u201cin the woods\u201d for twenty years\u2014maybe much longer (who really knows)\u2014a crazy, old, hippie musician-sage. He is \u201cin philosophy\u201d but just barely. Us for the woods! We would invite others to come and see what happens. We\u2019d be gone for a week. Five days of paddling. Six nights of talking about books and ideas and life, which for thinkers like Thoreau meant talking about philosophy, the activity of thought and receptivity to feeling that one can never consciously leave.<\/p>\n You\u2019re invited. I hope you come, but you have to be willing to get lost for a little while.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alejandro Strong will lead Kaag, Anderson, and a group of readers and paddlers on a <\/em>seven-day immersion trip<\/em><\/a> on the West Branch of the Penobscot River in Maine in the second week of August. Bring your copies of <\/em>Walden, <\/em>American Philosophy: A Love Story<\/a>, and your thoughts.<\/em><\/p>\n John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He is the author of<\/em> Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism and<\/em> Thinking Through the Imagination. His writing has appeared in<\/em> The New York Times, Harper\u2019s Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. He lives outside Boston with his wife and daughter.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIn wildness,\u201d Thoreau contended, \u201cis the preservation of the world.\u201d Robert Frost said, \u201cThe word ‘wood’ means ‘mad’ \u2026 I want to go wild in the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1184,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[29398,14351,29396,15753,8641,959,2711,1022,5014,3110,29394,29397,11902,3639,1849,29395],"class_list":["post-112190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-american-philosophy","tag-camping","tag-concord","tag-exploration","tag-henry-david-thoreau","tag-maine","tag-massachusetts","tag-nature","tag-new-england","tag-robert-frost","tag-the-woods","tag-thoreau-farm","tag-transcendentalism","tag-walden","tag-wilderness","tag-wildness"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF
\n<\/u>HENRY DAVID THOREAU<\/u><\/small><\/u><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>