I stepped outside and I broke the rules. I’m not supposed to go on these walks with people, but I think that Thoreau wouldn’t have condemned me for taking my roommate. We both knew where we were going, and we both knew what we wanted. We didn’t need to talk because we could hear each other perfectly, as Thoreau says, “…speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing.” (133)My roommate didn’t need to exclaim at how awake I was for such an early hour of the morning, because she could tell, she could see it by the extra energy in my step, by my wide eyes, and by my eagerness to get moving. I didn’t need to ask her if she was awake, because I knew she wasn’t, her tired eyes told me everything that I needed to know. If only humans could partake of this conversation more often, I think that we’d notice nature more.
It was cold when we stepped out of the door, and everything was illuminated in thin, grey, morning light. It made the leaves that much more noticeable on the trees, highlighting the new red bleeding through on otherwise green leaves. I started thinking about my marine biology class for a minute, trying to remember what made seaweed certain colors. I knew that high concentrations of chlorophyll made something look green but I couldn’t remember what it was that made something look red. I shoved the thought aside, because I knew that I’d remember eventually, and right now knowing what the name of it was did not matter. All that mattered was that I had seen the red.
People were out, but not very many, and none that made any measure to communicate in speech. It seems the language of the morning is a mixture of head nods, waves, and smiles. I started to see what Thoreau liked so much about mornings.
When I go for walks by myself I can’t help but feel like I’m missing something. Humans are just animals after all, and we’re quite the social beasts when we want to be. I think Thoreau knew he couldn’t be a recluse for the rest of his life and I think he even came to the conclusion that humans are nature too. Perhaps he thought that it was necessary to immerse yourself in what you thought was nature only to discover that what you left behind could also be a part of nature. In Solitude, he says, “In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.” (124-125) He says that he’s “never thought of them since”, but later on page 168 in his chapter entitled The Village, he says, “Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle.” He is acknowledging that being among society can be as “refreshing” as being among nature. He observes it as he does nature, but even though I know that he feels society is too cheap, I can’t quite see him totally disregarding it as some unfixable evil (129). I think that he sees that there is a possibility of improving society, and that perhaps through the very writing of Walden he is communicating this hope, that his self-banishment to the woods is his way of saying that we really can live another way and perhaps be even happier, but in order to see this, we have to remove ourselves from what is common and observe our lives as we do trees and their leaves. We can’t get all caught up in the “talk” that we forget to observe that which surrounds us, including each other.
I think you are right. I think that Thoreau’s message is too important to be caught up in whether you live alone or not. He isn’t trying to tell people that they shouldn’t occasionally have visitors or even that they shouldn’t live in town. He is more trying to say that there is a value in removing yourself from a situation and in reevaluating your life. On page 162 he says, “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” The world presses all of these expectations onto us. Society makes us think that if our house isn’t a certain size or we don’t have the money to live a certain way that we are somehow less for it. The truth is that we don’t need half the stuff that society tells us we need. We don’t need to be half the things that society tells us we need to be. And it isn’t until we shut out the world completely that we are able to tune into who we really are without all the noise of the outside world and thus discover who we really are.
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