The Perks of Being Alone

Ed Ayers: Nestled in the woods of a small town in Massachusetts lay Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau undertook the most famous experiment in simple living in American history. Thoreau believed that the only way to find meaning and lead a purposeful life was to renounce the rigors of society. In 1845 he built a tiny 10′ x 15′ cabin in a secluded spot near Walden Pond. His experiment was a meditation on the virtues of nature, spirituality, and solitude.

Henry Thoreau: I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Ed Ayers: For exactly two years, two months, and two days, Thoreau immersed himself in nature and logged his observations. During most of this time he was alone, and for Thoreau, solitude was the key to unlocking a higher consciousness. After returning to society in 1847, he eventually published Walden, a memoir of his extended retreat in the woods and one of the most celebrated books in American literature.

Laura D. Walls: He valued solitude and he found that he needed some every day, and if he didn’t get it, he got pretty testy and unpleasant to be around.

Ed Ayers: That’s scholar Laura Dassow Walls. She says that Thoreau saw solitude as a creative space for writing and reflection, as well as a means to live the best life.

Laura D. Walls: The difference is that he also needed to be around people, so there’s a little back and forth going on here. I wouldn’t say entirely bipolar, but he was surprisingly warm and loving and sensitive person, which was probably part of the problem, is that when he was hurt he would get very prickly and withdraw. He found it exhausting to be around people and he was terrible at smalltalk. In other words he’s the classic introvert. Thoreau turned that need for solitude into a kind of creative resource.

Ed Ayers: He was pretty much beloved by a lot of people, even though they recognized he was something of an odd duck. It’s not that he was shunned. He wasn’t in solitude because he was rejected, right?

Laura D. Walls: Right.

Ed Ayers: It’s something he chose.

Laura D. Walls: He was definitely somebody who people identified from early on as different. Later on they might’ve said eccentric. I think people were either attracted to him and found him lovable and really engaging to be around and he was always interesting, clearly, and other people just couldn’t tolerate him, and it became very mutual. It was a self-selecting process. You even see that in responses to his writing.
When his books when out, and Walden for instance, most reviews were just ecstatic, or at least very positive. Every now and then there would be one very huffy, “Who does he think he is?” It’s odd about solitary people, especially when it’s out there as a creative almost kind of brand, because they’re a bit threatening. They can in a sense be criticizing society or criticizing you as part of society. Some people share that and say, “Yeah, me too,” and other people are like, “Hey, you’re rejecting everything I care about.” That kind of divisiveness surrounds him too.

Ed Ayers: You mentioned Walden, which is the way that most people know about Thoreau being alone. How alone was he at Walden?

Laura D. Walls: It sounds like I’m trying to be funny. I’m not. He was alone when nobody else was there, which was a fair amount of the time. He’s out there on the edge of town. There weren’t any houses anywhere around him, not inhabited houses. He was a little off the main road and across the pond from the railroad, which means there were people always just a few hundred yards away. Walden Pond was the place that people went for picnics and to fish and to swim, which means daytime activities. There he was all day and all night too. Once the sun went down, he was totally alone. He really valued that. One of the points is that he was there 24 hours a day, which means that most of those hours he was alone, but then in the daylight hours, especially on weekends, people visited him all the time.
He had a system. If he was happy to have company, he’d put a chair out in front of his door. If the chair wasn’t there, it meant either, “I’m not here, I’m out on a walk, or I am busy, and so respect that,” and people did. The chair was visible from the road so people knew whether or not Henry was entertaining company. I get the sense from accounts of conversations with him that it was a back porch Cracker Barrel philosophizing time. It must’ve been fun, or he’d be hoeing his beans and people would holler at him from the road. There you’ve got this rhythm of people going either to entertain themselves or because they were genuinely friends that wanted to visit or the alone time, the solitary dawn, the morning hours, the times before people were in that social mode, when Thoreau was completely in his own world.

Ed Ayers: Some people have pointed to the proximity of the railroad and of Concord itself as evidence of Thoreau’s hypocrisy. Then he’s talking as if he’s out on the wilderness, and instead he could walk to somebody’s house for a meal at any point. How do we think about that? Is it theater? Is it imagined solitude is more important than the actual physical solitude? Help us understand that.

Laura D. Walls: First of all, when he went to Walden, he’d been dreaming of doing this ever since probably childhood. It goes all the way back to a memory when he was about five years old. What he imagined was solitude. That was the dream. He tried various ways of doing this, and none of them brought that kind of experience. To him it would be a creative kind of retreat. He wanted to write. He wanted to write poetry. He wanted to have this deep encounter with nature, not to be socializing, but to really try to go one-on-one with what really was a spiritual quest, a godhead. The chance opened up.
Emerson happened to be on a walk at Walden Pond. He happened to be there at a time when a group of speculators were bidding on this piece of property. He happened to feel in a good mood. He happened to have money at that moment. He said, “I’ll buy it.” That was the land. He comes back into town and tells Henry, and very quickly the deal is made that this is where Henry will finally have the chance to realize this long-held dream.
Henry builds on Emerson’s land. He thinks of himself as almost like he’s gonna be high up in the mountains. He’s not. He’s right there on the edge of town. The railroad’s there, so the railroad workers come by and say, “Hey, what are you doing?” People come by and they can see the house, “Why are you building this house way out here?” This is the turn that’s fascinating, because he could’ve said, “Go away. I don’t wanna talk to you.” He doesn’t. He starts talking with them. When they ask him what is he doing, he tells them. He’s a born teacher. He gets engaged by this process of trying to open up his heart to what he thinks is important. It’s almost a process of conversion or making disciples.
On the one hand, he still cherishes this dream of solitude and intense spiritual elevation, in what really does sound a lot like the classic hermit retreat. On the other hand, circumstances have drawn him into this other moat. Of course the third element to this is, look, he’s got responsibilities. He’s moved about a mile away from his family, but he’s still the oldest son. He still has to go back and take care of family chores. They wanna have him around for Sunday dinner. He has to make a few dollars, so he has to go do his laboring. He’s in town every two or three days to take care of this or that piece of business. That just isn’t part of Walden. Who wants to read about that? That’s just ordinary stuff. He doesn’t really tell us in Walden, except there’s a couple places where he says, “Well sure,” but that doesn’t change the basic point that he’s trying to make.

Ed Ayers: What I hear you saying is that Walden is authentically about solitude but it’s not really about isolation.

Laura D. Walls: That’s a good way to put it. What’s interesting about exactly that is once his experiment at Walden is done, and it was always an experiment, it was always gonna be temporary, so once it’s over, he’s back in town, he lives with the Emersons, then he goes back and lives with his own family, big households, lots of people, but what he brings with him is a kind of ethic of periodic solitude, of again, solitude as a kind of creative space or resource that really he thinks that all people could use. The trick is can you do that on Main Street. If it’s really real, you shouldn’t have to artificially remove yourself from society, create some kind of false bubble. You should be able to bring it with you back to the streets of New York or wherever you are. In that sense it’s something you carry with you. It’s an ethic for living, not for retreating from life.

Ed Ayers: Today people seek solitude from the digital world, in which we seem so immersed. Any speculation on advice that we might get from Henry David Thoreau in our time?

Laura D. Walls: That’s an easy one. Put down the damn phone. No, he would find this an assault, a 24/7 unrelenting assault on everything that solitude makes possible. The sense that you would never touch technology, no, he was fascinated by technology, but his demand was that you understand it and that you make sure that you use it, that it doesn’t use you.
His famous line about, “We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us,” that was his beef with the railroad. Not that it existed. Yes, it existed and he was fascinated by it and he rode the railroad himself, appreciated what it brought, but he drew the line when he thought that it was, as with all technologies, turning and controlling those of us who think that we’re using it, but in fact we’re becoming cogs in this big mechanism.
If you can use your cellphone in such a way that you can put it down, walk away from it, and then take it up later on only when you’re ready for it, then great, but he worries and would worry that today that’s not what is happening, that people are controlled by it, and they’re engineered, these devices, to make us need them. That would make him very suspicious. He would think we were slaves to it.

Ed Ayers: Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She’s the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life.