Thoreau understood that he was not so geographically remote. He received visitors (there is a chapter called “Visitors”) and took trips to the nearby village (there is also a chapter called “The Village”). He was, of course, interested in living off of the land and having a regular and intimate relationship with Nature. But he was equally interested in what he was leaving behind: the “fool’s life” of perpetual debt, in which men have “no time to be anything but a machine.” This other existence—this place where “a stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements”—is an indispensable, if negative, narrative and philosophical presence in the woods. Walden is not a summary rejection of quotidian reality: reminders of human society and industry do not violently intrude upon the landscape but comfortably inhabit the margins of his vision: “I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other.”
The reason, perhaps, that Thoreau is not put off by the proximity of trains and farms is that he was not seeking solitude for solitude’s sake. He was attempting to extract himself from a society that he found deeply troubling. Thoreau does not begin his record of life alone with the naturalist observations that we have come to associate with him (and at which he excelled). Instead, Walden begins with trenchant critique of “progress.” Thoreau’s aversion to the rapid technological changes brought about by industrialization did not issue from a Romantic attachment to unspoiled Nature. In fact, he quite likes the sound of the trains, or is, at the very least, resigned to their permanent integration into the landscape. In the chapter on “Sounds,” he describes train whistles as well as birdcalls. “I watch,” he writes “the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun.”
Nature, for Thoreau, was never an abstract or idealized entity. It was concrete, material, specific. In its nineteenth-century manifestation, therefore, it always appears circumscribed by culture, and this seems to have been acceptable, not objectionable, to the author. What mattered was not his literal, physical distance from civilization or the purity of the landscape. What Thoreau wanted was a spiritual or philosophical distance from society—and the retreat to Walden facilitated a modicum of non-participation.
Generations of critics and readers have chosen to emphasize the spiritual communion with Nature described by Thoreau and, of course, this was important to him. But we would do better to shift our attention to what Thoreau was withdrawing from. In this alternate light, one senses that Nature’s value lies primarily in this contrast to the social world—that its true value to him is as a means of retreat. Read in this way, Walden is not primarily a record of the so-called “natural” world but a social commentary.
