An Open Letter to Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau. Prince of the Transcendentalists. The self-insinuated ringleader of an army of disobedients. A desirer to live deliberately and a hopeful bride to a life of nature, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency. I write directly to you with all the knowledge of my self-centeredness and self-seeking. I must make this about myself because I could not possibly attach these feelings onto the heart of another. For all that I am worth, and with all of my words that well up inside me, I must place on you a flowing river of thoughts that I have only saved for you. This is my gift and you are the sole receiver, you quiet man of Walden Pond.

I was lost. I know that I was. Depression cloaked me in the weight of a thousand sleepless nights and left me in dire need of answers. I had no happiness in my gait and no keen regard for the sun. Even the simplest reminders of life and nature’s beauty alluded me, and I spent more time than I could ever accept living as a shell. A husk. A ghost. I yearned for a life lived deliberately, and I strived for peace, but to no avail. Until I found you. Henry David Thoreau, I found you.

You enticed me; you brought me into a cloud of seduction. You chose to live life deliberately. You did not want to know nature; you wanted to become it. You told me of the values of the sun and the pond and the virtue of solitude and isolation. You led me to the severity of political accountability, and how we as people should never cease to disobey reigning authorities in the midst of atrocious legislations. Walden Pond became my Garden of Eden; my Shangri-La. “Civil Disobedience” became an extension of my political ideology. I held fast to yours and Emerson’s writings as if they were the unwavering masts of a ruined shipwreck. Henry David Thoreau, I did not want to be like you, I wanted to become you. Such dire and severe motivation coursed through me to follow these Transcendentalist motions and philosophies, as I consumed your essays and poems one by one like a starving fire.

But what a filthy bastard you turned out to be, Thoreau. A lying, disingenuous, deceitful bastard. I was blinded by your writings of nature and song. Because these essays and philosophies gave me hope, they gave me something to believe in again, I never felt the need to look at you yourself, the man behind the pen. I never stopped to examine you, the quiet man of Walden Pond. If I had just taken the time to do that, to look behind your curtain and see your real self, I would have discarded you; forgotten about you as coldly as you deserve. No sun should shine on deceivers and liars.

Walden Pond was not yours. You found no solitude there. The soil was not yours; the labor did not belong to you. Emerson allowed you to reside there, to mooch off his earthly property. Your mother and sister would visit you there frequently, to feed you and do your laundry; to wash your dishes and tend to your needs. There was no solitude in your cabin. There was no isolation between those walls. There were only false revelations and dishonest epiphanies.

Even the stay at Walden Pond was not your true experience, for you would frequently leave the property. You wrote of such remoteness from the outside world; a separation from man, and only the trees and the birds to comfort your lonely soul. Conveniently, you left out all the details of your frequent, bi-weekly train rides into town, where you would spend days and nights in the taverns, asking for townspeople to pay for your food and ales. It astounds me how anyone would dare service you that way.

Moreover, what can be said of “Civil Disobedience?” Your rally cry for the masses? A raging, fiery plea for the American people to revolt against the government; to dismantle the system from the inside out, and rid the soil of a corrupt, unjust authority? Certainly, those words were powerful, and certainly, those words stoked an already lit flame, I will grant you that. You wrote these words while squeezed between the cold, unforgiving walls of a prison cell, seemingly for an extended period. Perhaps this was your reason for such a raging manifesto? Perhaps your long-standing containment in a jail cell fed you all the anger and justification you needed to write such a controversial piece? I know that this is not so, for I know that you were only in prison for a single night, merely for failing to pay a poll tax. If that was not disingenuous enough, I also know that you never chose to act upon these practices after you were released from prison either. You talked large, and you talked loudly; but you never had the spirit, the strength, or the courage ever to do anything for yourself. Cowardice should desecrate your name, Henry David Thoreau, as should deceit and fraud.

You broke the rules, my long-lost friend. Non-fiction should be a haven for those that wish to find comfort in the truthful, and solace in the tangible. No one slants Tolkien for not fighting orcs and goblins when he wrote of such things. But you, as an essayist, should be more than that. I could never say that you are evil, for I know that your actions are by no means immoral or violent. However, I do know without any reconsideration that I have been betrayed by you. I sought you out because you spoke of such beautiful, truthful realities in life. You spoke of things that brought my soul back to life. But as much as I want to share with you my gratefulness, I could never, for I know that it was in these words that you poured in lies, lies, and lies. I was resurrected by deceit, and restored by untruths. That is a feeling, an emotion that I could not possibly hope to understand, but I do know without uncertainty that you are the sole blame for this.

I will always talk about you, Henry David Thoreau. I will think of you, and read your work often. I will read of your blunders and your shortcomings, and feeling nothing but contentment about them. When you burnt 1/3 of Emerson’s forest in a preventable but raging fire, you blamed not yourself, but for critics and newspapers for being mad at you. You spoke of cleansing fire, and how it very well could have been lightning instead. You continued to avoid blame and judgement for the extent of your days, without ever feeling that you were the real antagonist all along. For that reason, you will always have a home in my mind. Your Walden Pond will be a new Walden Pond within me. Your manipulated words I will manipulate over again. Your false rage at the governments and the authorities will be silenced between the walls of my mind. For the rest of my life, your spirit can live on within me, as a prisoner and as an object of all my diatribes and complaints.

Henry David Thoreau, may my mind serve as your home, and may my soul move forward once more, in complete contentment as I smear your reputation and diminish your existence with every word I speak.

With All Sincerity,

Joshua Grady