When I was a junior in high school many, many years ago, we read in Mr. Smith's English class, Henry David Thoreau's classic memoir, Walden. After the class reviewed the book and discussed it, Mr. Smith asked me what I thought of Thoreau. My response was that I thought he should have gotten a job instead of hanging around the pond.
Today, I have been reading an essay on Walden in Loren Eiseley's collection, The Star Thrower. After all these years, Eiseley, has opened my mind to what Henry David Thoreau was really doing at Walden Pond. He was re-discovering humanity and its relationship to the Nature in which we all exist.
Eiseley quotes Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson as remarking, "Few adults can see nature," and adds that Thoreau "saw nature as another civilization, a thing of vaster laws and vagaries than that encompassed by the human mind." Eiseley adds that, "We are, in actuality, students of that greater order known as nature. It is into nature that man vanishes."
Today, as human activity is increasingly challenging the natural world, it is time to take a fresh look at Thoreau's "Walden" and, perhaps, get a fresh sense of that civilization into which we were born.
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