Walls does this throughout the book: turning to the historical record to dispel caricature and uncover the human truth. Thoreau as the stiff who never cracked a smile? Walls reveals all the irreverence — even sex jokes! — peppering his work, and recovers the anecdotes of his good-natured lightheartedness, especially around the young. (As he lay slowly dying from consumption, he asked his sister, Sophia, why the town’s children, who had so often been his companions on his walks, did not come to see him: “I love them as if they were my own,” he said; and though they were scared by the proximity of death, once Sophia invited them, come they did, to show him what they had found in Thoreau’s hometown of Concord’s fields, woods, and wetlands.) Thoreau the egocentric misanthrope who loved to lecture us all from high atop his soapbox? In an extraordinary five-page gloss on Walden, Walls acknowledges that “Thoreau’s anger and contempt can make us squirm today,” but she also shows that even his harshest polemics are lit by a profound empathy for passion and pain. Thoreau the lazy, privileged bum who squatted on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond? He daily hoed seven miles of beans that first year at Walden, on land he had to clear first, beside a house he built with his own hands, all while writing his first book.
But correcting the historical record, important as that may be, is only a small part of what Walls is up to. At the core of her book is the stunningly perceptive, deceptively simple insight that “[Thoreau’s] social activism and his defense of nature sprang from the same roots: he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart.” Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” in Walls’s view, are of a piece, and Thoreau’s entire life, she contends, was spent in search of whatever it is that connects nature to society, the wild to the domestic, in one “community of life.”
As commonsensical as this claim may seem, it in fact flies in the face of decades’ worth of near-consensus that Thoreau was the champion of disconnection, of running away from a decadent, deadening society to a pure, solitary, natural idyll: to wilderness. This take on Thoreau really began in 1967, when the historian Roderick Frazier Nash published Wilderness and the American Mind. The Wilderness Act of 1964, which legally defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” had just become law, and Nash, who saw the preservation of wilderness as an unalloyed good, rooted the Act in a deep American history in which Thoreau was a key player: the first philosopher of American wilderness, as Nash put it, who “cut the channels in which a large portion of thought about wilderness subsequently flowed.”
