Walking with Henry

Note: Today marks the first anniversary of this blog. I’ve enjoyed writing it more than I would have imagined. Many thanks to all of you who have read it, commented on it, or followed it on my Facebook page. (My third post for Words Without Borders also appears today.)

The op-ed page of the Sunday Times features an item on Thoreau by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Here’s how it begins:

“You must walk like a camel,” Thoreau writes, and I feel my lower lip drooping and a hunch coming into my back. This isn’t what he means, of course. He means that I must ruminate while walking. The temperature is in the 30s, the wind has settled, the snow gone from the corn stubble. I admit that I set my thoughts aside for a few minutes on the uphill leg of this walk. But they are back, bringing Thoreau with them.

By his standards, I’m walking all wrong. But then Thoreau is a prig. He is often right, about almost anything. What makes him priggish is the self-rejoicing in his rightness. What saves him is the self-contradiction rampaging through his work.

The charge of priggishness is often made about Thoreau, and I have to admit there is some justice in it, especially regarding Walden. But as I’ve said elsewhere, there is much less of this in the Journal: more doubt, more of what Klinkenborg calls self-contradiction.

While on his winter walk, Klinkenborg sees a man “sharpening a chain saw, cutting firewood from the debris piled up on the banks.” I was reminded of what Thoreau says in Walden about collecting his own firewood and cutting it at home, rather than have it cut and delivered for him.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.