(Bloomington, IN) Very early this morning, my Chicago-bound flight rose over the tanks and derricks of East Boston, turned above the thick settlements of Cambridge and Somerville, and then, as the houses dispersed from tight rows into suburban swirls cut out of forest, we passed by the gleaming waters of Fresh Pond, Spy Pond, and finally—if I am not mistaken—Walden Pond.
That’s where Thoreau went in 1845, because “we need the tonic of wilderness.” But even in his day, a view from the clouds would have shown that he was not remote from society. “I was seated by the shore of a small pond,” he recalls, “about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it.” I take “higher” to be literally accurate, a symbol of his spiritual elevation, and practically significant because he could, “by standing on tiptoe …, catch a glimpse … of some portion of the village.” In other words, even though the woods were more extensive than they are now, Thoreau was surrounded by people. A fenced road and the Fitchburg railway line came nearby, the latter even “touch[ing] the pond”; Thoreau would “usually go to the village along its causeway and [was], as it were, related to society by this link.”
Thoreau was contemptuous of the passengers who rattled by inside the train. They thought they are going somewhere interesting, but they would miss reality along the way. They also accounted the costs and benefits wrong. They calculated that they were spending little time in traveling between Fitchburg and Boston, but they forgot the time that they had sacrificed to earn the money for the fare, not to mention the other people’s lifetimes sacrificed to build the rails. “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man. … The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.” (Thoreau seems to spare the men who work the freight trains, because they pass slowly and frequently enough that they interact with him.)
If Thoreau condemned passengers who rode in a rickety train through Middlesex County, what would he say of us who zoom overhead in a pressurized cabin? I think I am going to Indiana and back in 48 hours, but many people have spent many days to pay for that journey, and I will see little along the way.
I was far higher this morning than Thoreau’s cabin, afforded a view of much more woods and also vastly more houses. We have sliced the old woods to ribbons to build hundreds of thousands of detached houses so that we don’t have to see much of our neighbors. Thoreau had prophesied the domestication of his little piece of wildness. In the winter of ‘45, standing in the middle of the frozen pond, he detected “a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside” nearby, which he suspected was “worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters.” He added: “The ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.”
I could see the “villas” by their thousand this morning. The trail may be long gone. But I’d like to think that Thoreau would say: You don’t need much space for solitude. An airplane seat will do, if that’s where you happen to be. “Yet we should often look over the tafferel [the decorated stern] of our craft, like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors picking oakum.” And that’s why I looked down at Walden.
(See also “Hamatreya II.”)