This year, Walden turns 150, and the sesquicentenary of Henry David Thoreau's chronicle of two years spent living "alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts" has inspired a flurry of commemorations. The Concord Museum is hosting an anniversary lecture series; several new editions of Walden will be published this year, introduced by the likes of John Updike and Bill McKibben; and in the course of the year a host of commentators will be weighing in.

Thoreau's legacy is two-pronged. First, he is remembered as a political prophet, advocating nonviolent resistance to civil government. He cut his political teeth opposing slavery, and in Walden he tells the tale of spending a night in jail after refusing to "pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like chattel." (2004, incidentally, also marks the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's essay "Slavery in Massachusetts.") If his masterful treatise "Civil Disobedience" didn't galvanize the abolitionist movement, it did find ready readers in ensuing generations; it inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and was even occasionally quoted by those who protested the 2003 war in Iraq.

At the same time, Thoreau is heralded as a great nature writer and an environmentalist avant le lettre, a reputation resting not only on Walden but also on his many writings about the natural world. Several of his less-famous nature pieces have been recently collected in Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. But "natural history" perhaps does not do these essays justice, for Thoreau goes beyond the painstaking observation and vivid description that is the skeleton of great nature writing. In the title essay, for example, Thoreau not only traces the history of the apple tree, he also wrings lessons about good living from "hardships" the crab apple must endure to "bear a sweet fruit." And the essay sounds an elegiac note as well: "The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England." So, yes, this is natural history, but it is also a reflection on moral formation and an environmental allegory.

Ever since Walden was first published, Thoreau devotees have wanted to see for themselves the land he so eloquently describes. The transformation of Thoreau's isolated parcel into a popular tourist spot is chronicled in W. Barksdale Maynard's engaging Walden Pond: A History. Nowadays, Maynard reports, more than 700,000 people visit Walden Pond every year. Of course, with the tourists comes both environmental degradation and crass commercialism. E. B. White captured this in his description of a 1939 visit to Walden Pond. "I knew I must be nearing the woodland retreat," White wrote, "when the Golden Pheasant lunchroom came into view—Sealtest ice cream, toasted sandwiches, hot frankfurters, waffles, tonics, and lunches. … I followed a footpath and descended to the water's edge. … [On the east shore was a] dressing room for swimmers, a float with diving towers, drinking fountains of porcelain, and rowboats for hire." Today erosion, litter, and simply too many visitors threaten the Walden preserve. Thoreauvians have spearheaded loving conservation efforts, but conservationists are not saints, and the campaigns to save Walden from total destruction at the hands of irresponsible tourism are dogged by infighting and factionalism.

If Walden has prompted millions of Americans to make something of a pilgrimage, Thoreau's own spiritual leanings are a bit hard to nail down. Many Thoreau scholars have skipped over the question of religion, either allowing the tidy category "Transcendentalist" to stand in for a real reading of Thoreau's spirituality, or taking Thoreau's own pronounced disdain for organized religion as permission to move on to other subjects. In a recent monograph, Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness, Hampshire College professor Alan Hodder fills this lacuna, thoughtfully considering Thoreau as a spiritual and religious writer. Hodder investigates, inter alia, Thoreau's links between the sensory and the spiritual. At Walden Pond, visual meditations upon the watery mirrors of lakes and ponds are a springboard to the transcendent.

Consider the chapter that sits at the heart of Walden, "The Ponds." Though at first blush a straightforward and even tedious natural description of the ponds, "The Ponds" is really an exercise in meditation. The waters that inspire Thoreau are both literal (Walden Pond itself) and metaphorical, as in his philosophical musing that "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars." The pond provides fish that allow Thoreau the simple life he praises, but it is also, in Hodder's phrase, "the principal pretext for his reflections on the self."

And it may be Thoreau's reflections on the self—not his powerful perorations about slavery, nor his luminous evocations of nature's bounty—that explain Walden's influence over five generations of American readers.

Walden marks a shift in American letters. Antebellum autobiography was, in the main, didactic: Benjamin Franklin wrote to provide a model of American living, Frederick Douglass wrote to foment an abolitionist awakening. Thoreau, too, has an agenda—his imperative to simplify, to "let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand." But simplicity is a means; it is the context for self-fashioning.

At the outset of Walden, Thoreau feels the need to apologize for the pesky first person that pervades his account of Concord:

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life. … Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. … I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of those questions in this book. In most books, the I … is omitted; in this it will be retained. … I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.

And yet, that self-mocking disclaimer notwithstanding, the I is essential in Walden, for the I is not merely the narrator but also the plot; the real story here is about the reinvention of self, once that self is removed from, in Thoreau's phrase, "civilized life."

Walden has inspired many imitators. One of the earliest was music critic Philip G. Hubert's Liberty and a Living: The Record of an Attempt to Secure Bread and Butter, Sunshine and Content by Gardening, Fishing and Hunting. Written in 1889, Liberty and a Living recounts Hubert's move from New York City to a one-acre plot on Long Island, where he and his family raised bees, gathered oysters, and grew veggies in their garden. A more famous ersatz Thoreau is Henry Beston, whose 1928 The Outermost House was reissued last year in a 75th-anniversary edition. In our own era, zoologist Bernd Heinrich wrote A Year in the Maine Woods, and David Gessner brought out A Wild, Rank Place. (The title comes from Thoreau's Cape Cod, but Gessner's insistence that "I come to the Cape to live deliberately" is straight from Walden, in which Thoreau famously declares "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.") If you're looking for a feminist twist, try Drinking the Rain, in which activist Alix Kates Shulman leaves New York for a remote cabin in Maine. There is, in short, a whole subgenre of American belle lettres characterized by the flight from community to isolation, the discovery of the self against the backdrop of rugged wilds.

The promises of rediscovery and reinvention animate Walden, but those same promises are also Walden's shortcomings. The implication of Walden is that one discovers oneself best when one is alone, when one has withdrawn from community, context, and kin. This is Beatnik self-knowledge, the glittering lie that one learns who one is not around a crowded table, not in the hustle and bustle of domesticity, but on the road, where one is free of all the petty distractions that prevent us from really knowing ourselves.

Thoreau's conception of the self doesn't square very well with the teachings and traditions of the Church; it is hard to articulate Walden in the idiom of those who are known, elected, and ransomed as a people. This is not to say that there is no place for solitude in the Christian life—to the contrary, solitude is a vital Christian discipline. It is rather a cautionary reminder, as we celebrate an unmistakably great work of American literature, that perhaps we come to know ourselves best not in the isolation of the woods but in the squawks of children and the demands of neighbors, in the pulls and proddings of the community who can remind us who we really are.

Lauren F. Winner is the author of Girl Meets God (Algonquin) and Mudhouse Sabbath (Paraclete).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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