Thoreau, Emerson, and the Concord Mind

In the summer of eighteen forty-five, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Henry David Thoreau walked two miles from the center of Concord to the shore of Walden Pond, borrowed an axe, and began building a small cabin in the woods. He was not homeless. His family home was a twenty-minute walk away. He was conducting an experiment. He wanted to know what a life stripped to its essentials would feel like, and whether he could find in deliberate simplicity something that ordinary American life was failing to provide.

Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days. He grew beans, kept a journal, received visitors, walked to town for dinner, and went to jail once for refusing to pay his poll tax as a protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War. The resulting essay, called Resistance to Civil Government and later renamed Civil Disobedience, became one of the most influential political texts in the world. Gandhi read it. Martin Luther King read it. It was read by every major nonviolent resistance movement of the twentieth century.

Thoreau's neighbor and mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had already articulated the philosophical movement they both inhabited. In his eighteen thirty-six essay, Nature, Emerson had proposed that the natural world was a living symbol of spiritual reality, and that the individual human soul contained within it a direct access to truth that required no church, no dogma, and no intermediary. He later named this idea the Over-Soul, in an essay of eighteen forty-one. American Transcendentalism was born in Concord, on walks along the Concord and Assabet rivers, in conversations between a former minister and a surveyor's son who believed that a pond in the woods could contain a universe.