Perhaps Humphreys intended Followed by the Lark as an act of love. But by making Henry so intimate, familiar, and relatable—by quite literally “domesticating” him—her novel betrays the historical Thoreau, who would have condemned it as facile—“easy reading.” Thoreau chides us for treating “great poets” as if they were fortune-tellers, and tells us to “stand on tiptoe” when we read.
Distance can be salutary. Across his writings, Thoreau often speaks of the value of self-alienation as a “doubleness” that we can and should cultivate. With a double mind, Thoreau says, he can “stand as remote from [himself] as from another,” so that he can inhabit both “the driftwood in the stream, and Indra in the sky looking down on it.” This deific projection can appear self-aggrandizing. But it isn’t: the eye-in-the-sky vision instead deflates us, inviting us to see ourselves impersonally, as objects as worthy of curiosity as any other. For Thoreau, only as strangers do we manage to see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are. Alienation makes us present as closeness cannot.
Readers seeking a different kind of intimacy with Thoreau should turn instead to Lawrence Buell’s Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a helpful primer on the historical Thoreau’s thought. It’s short, but thorough: Buell considers Thoreau’s biography as well as his reception by later acolytes and scholars, his journaling and methods of composition, his interest in Indigenous peoples, and his commitments to science as it was then developing. Buell succeeds at defamiliarizing Thoreau, leaving us better equipped to grasp the complexity of his project.
Buell’s book achieves that in part by showing how apparent oppositions in Thoreau’s writing actually work together. As Buell argues, “the relationship between the political Thoreau and Thoreau the poet-naturalist was as much a symbiotic tension as a complete antithesis.” How do we reconcile the writer who cataloged all the colors of blue in Walden Pond’s water with the political proselytizer for small government? Buell helps us see how Thoreau’s vision of better human government follows from his careful attention to the rules governing the natural world. Grasping both requires a disciplined distance.