BOOKS THAT SWERVED MY THINKING IN 2024: Part Three (and Final)

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau and Senses of Walden by Stanley Cavell

This post is the third and final in a brief series about the books I read in 2024 that have swerved my thinking, which is to say books that sent my thinking about the world, myself, and/or my work off on a new trajectory that’s likely to hold for a good while. Part One is available here, and Part Two here.

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Like most folks who like books, I have some that I revisit and a few that I reread. Revisiting a book tends to be about comfort — returning to a cherished phrase or perfectly polished thought, passing through a familiar literary neighborhood and noting your favorite landmarks. Lots of books fall into this category for me, particularly poetry. (Louise Glück’s Collected Poems 1962-2012 has nearly worn a groove in the bookshelf from all the times I’ve pulled it off and slid it back this year.)

Rereading an entire book, however, is for me usually about unfamiliarity. I’m not the first to have noticed that reading is always a conversation between your current self and the text, and some texts whisper differently to different selves. Just this year I reread World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer, a novel that I hadn’t revisited since college. My son picked it out to read as we went through every last belonging in preparation for moving apartments, and I finished it in our new place. This time through, I could see what so attracted 20-year-old me to Gordimer and this book: the desire to fit somewhere while recognizing that that somewhere could be far away and equal parts seductive and opaque (and to a certain degree seductive because opaque). Only years and years later, actually moving away from Kansas and finding room for myself in a strange place, could I understand the book and my (younger self better.

Which brings me to Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Senses of Walden by Stanley Cavell. I’ve read Walden many times over the years, usually followed by Cavell’s deep reflection on it.

(Walden and I have history, one based upon pretense and young preening. I’ll tell you all about it some other time when I’ve better figured our how to forgive myself.)

I’ve tend to read Walden every couple of years. I picked it up again this summer, and it felt new from the first page, an unknown wood to explore and inhabit. For example, I somehow hadn’t noticed before (or noted before) how Thoreau apologizes in the book’s second paragraph that he will be talking about himself in the pages to follow and that he “should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well” but that he has no alternative because of the “narrowness of [his] experience.” He then devotes much of the rest of the first chapter to cataloging how terrible and unfortunate everyone is in Concord. Lol, as the kids say.

Walden is a book about looking, about paying close enough attention to the ordinary that it takes you to its other, bigger side. This time the the later chapters proved particularly revealing. I had forgotten about “The Pond In Winter” in which Thoreau takes the reader through the wonder that is a frozen Walden:

Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. (p. 252)

Walden is so clear and so deep that many have long mused that its center must be bottomless. Given how Thoreau describes the pond and the need for the universal and timeless (see “Reading”), you’d be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that he would embrace this speculation, perhaps recognizing how humanity can make room for its imaginations to run without end.

Instead, Thoreau sets out to measure Walden’s depth and found that he “fathomed it easily” with a “cod-line” and a small stone of about a pound and a half. The pond is quite deep, but the stone hits farthest bottom at one hundred seven feet. He writes: “This is remarkable a depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination” (p. 254). A deep pond may trigger our belief in the infinite, but we must be ready to let out the line until the stone rests on the bottom, even if we are measuring the ocean itself. In so doing we bring ourselves closer to the world that we seem anxious not to see as it is.

Thoreau’s project is arguably to reenact America’s founding. (He takes up residence in the woods, after all, on July 4th “by accident.”) Stanley Cavell’s Senses of Walden, a rich and subtle close reading of Walden, sees it as so much more — as Thoreau’s taking it upon himself to write the scripture of a new nation, the founding story it needs to tell itself into proper existence, the means to make sense of its contradictions, such as a revolution that we won yet still we are not free. As he reads closely, Cavell has much to say about writing as vocation and practice and work. Thoreau beautifully describes how men from around Concord come to Walden in winter to harvest ice for the year. They cut thick slabs of the pond’s surface, cart away its clarity and freshness to all corners to sustain themselves throughout the seasons, and the pond replenishes itself. This practice, as with Thoreau stooping to drink from a hole in the ice and encountering summer and Heaven, is a powerful metaphor for writing — a writer closely observes and then takes that pieces of that clarity with them for sustenance.

As Cavell sees it, Walden itself is a destination and an act of building, just as Walden was, and it is also an act of leaving.

My copy of Senses has so many creased corners, yet coming to it fresh after Walden turned me to look in new places. I used to believe that studying philosophy was more worthy than other pursuits, in part because it seemed so widely ignored, even largely abandoned. That conviction couldn’t survive collision with the effort of life, but I probably needed needed it at the time just to keep up the work for as long as it took.

What is worth doing? Which waters should we build our houses by? These are the questions to ask, to insist upon asking. The questions particularly compel these days as my kids have reached the early edges of adulthood at a time when the skies ahead of us all seem to be darkening. Cavell writes:

To realize where we are and what we are living for, the conditions of our present, the angle at which we stand to the world, the writer calls “improving the time,” using a preacher’s phrase and giving his kind of turn to it. No one’s occasions are exactly those of another, but our conditions of improvement are the same, especially our outsideness and, hence, the world’s presence to us. And our conditions are to be realized within each calling, whatever that happens to be. Each calling — what the writer means (and what anyone means, more or less) by a “field” of action or labor — is isomorphic with every other. This is why building a house and hoeing and writing and reading (and we could add, walking and preparing food and receiving visitors and giving charity and hammering a nail and surveying the ice) are allegories and measures of one another. All and only true building is edifying. All and only edifying actions are fit for human habitation. Otherwise they do not earn life. If your action, in its field, cannot stand such measurement, it is a sign that the field is not yours.

Words like ‘field’, ‘labor’, ‘edifice’, ‘economy’ contain whole forms of life. We are called differently to the world we have been thrown into. The work give to us is not just to build, but to edify, to be morally instructive and instructed.

The years ahead will be hard and dark. We must avoid being captured by our tools. We must listen to our callings and must measure the angle at which we stand to the world. We will need to be good builders. We will, ourselves, need to be strong buildings for others to inhabit.

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