CHAPTER 3

I to Myself

Henry David Thoreau

THAT WE ALTERNATELY TRASH or idolize our solitaries suggests something about our need for idols elsewhere in our lives; but, as the Buddha and Hebrew biblical prophets point out repeatedly, idols are an avoidance mechanism, a place where we can park and abandon our dreams instead of accepting our responsibility to live them out—to actualize them, to incarnate them through our lives. The vocalist Nina Simone railed against this phenomenon: audiences who paid to witness her anger and heartbreak on stage and then left the theater to go about their lives unchanged. What these solitaries do is so hard—or such is the commonplace myth—so eccentric and daunting that ordinary people couldn’t possibly achieve it, and so the solitary must either be surpassingly strange or possess some unique strength or both. In fact, as reading Henry David Thoreau makes uncomfortably clear, all that’s required is to pull out our ear buds and turn off our camera phones and listen to the sounds, pleasant and troubling alike, that the universe provides, including most especially its silence.

The notion of Thoreau as a hermit is so far from the facts that what’s curious is why it developed in the first place, since Walden is replete with anecdotes of chatty visits from townspeople and travelers and lengthy passages praising the virtues of simple hospitality (“You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give”). Far from being a wilderness, Walden Pond was an easy walk from the center of Concord and a regular destination for picnics and anglers, a fact Thoreau never conceals because he is writing, not to manufacture a myth but to craft a good sentence. “No other male American writer,” observes Laura Dassow Wilds in her fine and sympathetic biography, “has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.” The reasons for that discrediting, I argue, arise from our need to savage solitaries who so emphatically and cheerfully break social norms, because they show how easily it may be done, as well as our suspicion and mistrust of those who sing in praise of solitude. We seem either to mock (Thoreau) or idolize (Thomas Merton) those who seek and enjoy solitude, perhaps because perceiving them as ordinary folks might require us to question the cocoon of noise and artificial light with which we surround ourselves and that constitutes contemporary life. Critics demean Thoreau for allowing Ralph Waldo Emerson, dean of New England writers and Thoreau’s advocate and benefactor, to pay his poll tax to spring him from the night in jail that resulted in “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau’s most famous essay—but those same critics overlook that Thoreau risked much graver penalties when he assisted slaves fleeing to Canada, since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 imposed significant fines and up to six months in prison for anyone caught helping runaways.

In Walden and elsewhere, Thoreau wrote a prose oratorio in praise of solitude, and let his readers pause in due reverence: the man sure knew how to turn a phrase. I am not surprised to learn that the book required four times as long to write as he spent living on the pond—eight drafts in ten years. The writing bears witness to that slow and patient hand. Out of print at the time of Thoreau’s death, Walden has since taken on a life of its own, packed as it is with aphorisms that have entered the common parlance of many who have no idea of their origin: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” “My greatest skill has been to want but little.” (My version, arrived at independently: “The secret to contentment is low overhead.”) “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away,” this last so familiar as to be enshrined in an Internet source called ClichéWeb. “Men have become tools of their tools.”

Any one of those pithy sentences—and Walden and his voluminous other writings contain many more—could serve as a koan for a Buddhist monk, but I do Thoreau a disservice if I pigeonhole him as an aphorist. His writing teaches us to slow down and look at the world. “No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert,” he writes, Buddhism summarized in a sentence. “What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry . . . compared to the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?” He finds as much to see and remark upon in a road cut or a farm pond as other writers find in the Himalayas.

Thoreau is the prophet of empiricism, showing us through his writing how the road cut and the farm pond are imbued with the divine—in the same manner as Cézanne, who sought to paint the soul in a sugar bowl. In place of angels, Thoreau has birds; for his visions of God, he turns to the pine and the rock. His descriptions of his encounters with the natural world match the writing of any mystic regarding an encounter with the Divine. “The earth is all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube.” Melting ice is the “blood of winter.” “[T]here is nothing inorganic . . . the earth . . . is living poetry like the leaves of a tree.”

He writes “living poetry” in the form of prose, celebrating the interior journey. “We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers,” he writes. “God is alone,—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.” To write as much is to underscore what psychologists tell us: every partner to relationship, every single parent raising children, every caregiver, needs time alone, down time in which to relocate the beat of her or his own drum, because in that unique beat lies our particular access to the rhythms of love. Without time deliberately dedicated to solitude, partnership, parenting, and caregiving become rote, and it is a short step from rote to abuse.

So what is solitude? Asked to define it, most would describe the simple fact—difficult or impossible for many of us to bear for long—of being alone. But clearly Thoreau has something else in mind: “Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”

As critic Harold Bloom has pointed out, the interior journey lies at the heart of the American national identity. It differentiates even American Roman Catholics—who among U.S. churchgoers retain the most direct spiritual connection to their European roots—from Roman Catholics elsewhere in the world. Pope John XXIII might have espoused the doctrine of the primacy of the individual conscience, but, among Roman Catholics, Americans observe it most enthusiastically. “I never had much use for authority,” my mother declared, epitomizing in a sentence why Americans are such a headache for popes and prelates. She was a convert from Bible Belt Protestantism and as such had no truck with being told what to believe, but in the United States even cradle Catholics grow up in a Protestant land and so absorb via osmosis an interest in shaping for and by ourselves the terms of our encounter with the sacred.

Emerson eloquently articulated this essential American characteristic—the search for a personal, particular spiritual philosophy not without but within—in his essay “Self-Reliance,” but Bloom traces its appearance and role in every major American religious, spiritual, or philosophic practice. It fueled the fervor of the first great revivals at Cane Ridge in Kentucky in 1801 and in the “burned-over district” of the early 1800s in upstate New York, where it gave birth to Mormonism. It explains our current fascination with Asian philosophies, introduced into American thinking by Emerson and by Thoreau, whom Emerson commissioned to translate the Bhagavad-Gita and who wrote that he preferred it over all other wisdom writings. “Everywhere I use ‘God,’ ” Emerson wrote in a letter, “I would prefer to use ‘Budh’ ”—his spelling of our contemporary “Buddha”—but even he, who challenged the Harvard Divinity School with his unorthodox beliefs, was not willing to risk his reputation and livelihood by publicly rejecting the Christian personification of an omnipotent and omniscient power.

In keeping with their times, my parents were reserved. I never saw my father touch my mother in public, even to hold hands. Neither parent told me that she or he loved me until late in life, long after my father’s death, when, after many trips to California, my mother grew more comfortable with speaking, in addition to showing, what she felt. But I grew up with the assumption, woven into the fabric of my consciousness, of security. Somehow my parents, for whom money was scarce, would always provide. There was the land—a huge vegetable garden—and the river, whose fish were free for the taking, and the woods and fields, with their supply of small game and deer, and there was the understanding, commonplace among those who have little, that we had a responsibility to help one another. From ambition or anger or in investigation of my solitude I might leave home, but that inbred understanding of the importance and necessity of collective endeavor would never leave me.

At the same time, I understood that, when I became an adult, I had a destiny uniquely my own, not to be dictated by distant authorities, whether in Washington, New York, or Rome, which it was my responsibility to seize and shape. I would receive no financial support because there was none to be given. This was a great advantage—not materially, of course, but creatively and spiritually. My parents each had a rich interior life, and they brought those lives to their communities; they left their community, my small town, a better place. Using books loaned by the monks, my mother founded a library in an abandoned gas station; today it occupies a handsome building that would be the pride of any town. My father was not a joiner—he was, of the pair, the more dedicated solitary—but he donated money and skills to community groups. They were solitaries living their lives not codependent but in parallel. Theirs was, I believe, a healthy marriage.

The distillery where my father oversaw maintenance made a bourbon called Antique, and practiced small-batch distilling before the marketers named the practice. My father was proud of his product in an unassuming way—a way rooted in his character, which, in our flash-and-dazzle-over-pause-and-think world, knew only one way to accomplish a task, any task, no matter how trivial, and that was to put all his heart and soul into it. He would have scorned the concept of multitasking, since to do several tasks at once was inevitably to short-change them all. In this he was a kind of Zen master.

But I have gotten ahead of the story of the virgin cypress.

In the 1930s, after the end of Prohibition, Seagram bought and expanded a small-batch distillery which dated from the 1800s. It added vast, deep tubs to hold and heat the mixture of ground corn and grains, water and sugar and yeast, cooked and then distilled to produce alcohol, a byproduct of fermentation that might be thought of as yeast poop. A favorite trick of my father’s was to take an unsuspecting guest on a distillery tour, in the course of which he would open a small window in the cover of the steaming vat of mash and invite the visitor to take a deep breath. That would knock you off your feet.

The vats were made of old-growth cypress, a tree that roots itself in swamps and thus possesses a hard, fine grain nearly impervious to water and wear. The vats were cleaned after every use with scalding water. I recall a story, probably true, of a laborer parboiled when he was mistakenly shut into a tub during the cleaning process. In any case, the clank and roar and rumble and stink of the distillery frightened me, a timid child, or perhaps a sensible child who even then did not share my father’s indifference to occupational hazards. When my father took me on a tour I dragged my feet, providing the first evidence that this, his youngest and book-brightest child, was not going to pursue a career as an engineer.

Sometime in the 1950s Seagram shifted to stainless steel vats, presumably because of their ease of cleaning and because, no matter how impervious, the cypress tubs were showing the effects of years of being filled with witches’ hot brew. As the cypress was removed, plank by plank, my father stored it to one side of the distillery workshop. Under his hand, those cypress planks from the distillery mash tubs became tongue-and-groove paneling for the interior of his new house. For the first decade after my family moved in, the house reeked of bourbon mash; for another ten years, a visitor could evoke a life now gone by pressing her nose to the grooves in the paneling and taking a deep breath.

One of my first childhood memories is following my father into his shop—another place of dust and whine and roar—to watch as he guided the cypress boards through the planer, a fantastically dangerous machine lacking, of course, any cautions or protections. The planer peeled away the top, mash-permeated layer of cypress to reveal the cream-white grain underneath. A waist-high device with a roller bar and a heavy metal base embossed with the Coca-Cola trademark supported the long planks as they came out of the planer, but the longest of the planks required the support of a guiding hand so as to be kept level and prevent the weight of the plank from pinching the planer blade. At times when no one else was at hand, Father called me to the job. I was barely tall or strong enough to support the plank’s heavy weight and lived in terror that I was going to let it slip and incur my father’s disdain or, even worse, wrath. His disdain I learned to live with, but you did not want to incur his wrath.

Years later, when I told the story of the cypress planks to a fellow student in college, he exclaimed, “Why, that was nothing but theft!” Child of corporate suburbia, he did not realize that in the 1950s, had my father not claimed the mash-permeated cypress that we now see as priceless, it would have rotted in an open dump. Nor did he understand the underground economies of strapped rural communities, which—until the arrival of plastic and an economy of disposables—practiced recycling long before it became hip in urban enclaves. Had my father thought that cypress had a future other than the dump, he’d have left it to that future. Or so I like to think.

At the new house, now under construction, my father and his older sons laid the planed cypress planks on a great block of limestone, which served as a staging area for every family activity from major construction projects to cleaning fish—one end of the block had a cylindrical hole through which blood and guts could drain into a pan for the ever-present dogs. The block was about seven feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep—when I cited these figures in front of an audience, an engineer pulled out his phone and, working from the average density of limestone, calculated the rock’s weight: somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 pounds. The stone had been used as a hitching block for the teams of great draft horses that before modernization had pulled loads of grain to the distillery. Draft horses are bred for size and strength, and the hitching post to which they were tied needed serious gravity so as to hold them if they spooked. Five to seven thousand pounds of limestone met the requirement. The cylindrical hole had once enclosed a brass pole, to which the horses’ reins had been tied.

How that block got three miles from the distillery to my parents’ new house is a mystery, though the distillery had block-and-tackle and my father had determination and sons, and thus the pyramids got built. Once the stone reached our house, my father lowered it (from what? how?) onto four old-style car jacks, one at each corner, which sat on a cement pad that had been poured to support the stone’s weight. To build the stone table’s legs, each jack raised the stone a notch, a crowbar was inserted, and one of my brothers risked life or at least permanent dismemberment by sliding in a thin flagstone slab slathered with cement. No, that can’t be true. Surely the flagstone legs were constructed first, then the block lowered onto them? Either way, in the end a three-ton, flagstone-legged table was created—a table that will mystify archeologists a thousand years hence, when the house and all around it have long disappeared. What exotic rites were performed here? For what god or goddess was this altar built?

Next to the limestone table, an enormous brass kettle—another theft from the distillery?—hung suspended from a tripod welded by one of the monks. These were the years of modernization, the 1950s, when everything new was presumed to be an improvement on what had come before. The distillery was replacing old tools and materials, leaving them free for the taking. The kettle we used for making burgoo.

Now, burgoo. Decades later I was contacted by the Kitchen Sisters from National Public Radio, asking for a recipe for this peculiarly Kentucky dish. “Well,” I said, “you start with wild game—”

The host interrupted. “Wild game? Everyone else I’ve talked to says chicken or pork.”

“Everyone else grew up in the suburbs,” I retorted. “The defining ingredient for burgoo is wild game—little animals, squirrel and quail and rabbit, thrown into the stew to give it that gamey taste. You can’t call it burgoo unless the base is wild game. Otherwise you’re just making plain old stew.”

Burgoo was the meal of choice for winter parties. Every man brought his wild game—though there was hen and pork and goat for good measure—and tossed it into the pot, along with tomatoes canned from the previous summer’s gardens, potatoes, carrots, and whatever leftovers the wives’ refrigerators or fruit cellars yielded, with slugs of bourbon thrown in to make a down-home marinade. The stew was cooked overnight, or at least all day, over an open fire, while the town residents slid down the nearby hill, using abandoned car hoods for sleds. After the snow had been packed into a sheet of ice, these slabs of metal developed great speed, and a common trick was to pile onto the five or six people already on board as the hood sped by. The car hoods had razor-sharp edges and the undertaking was great fun and fantastically dangerous, as proved to be the case when someone was gravely injured by a hood slicing open his leg. That put an end to that particular party, though I close my eyes and smell the smoke from the fire, the gamey-scented, mouthwatering burgoo, and see the shadows the fire’s flickering light casts on the cross-hatching of the tree trunks and limbs against the darkening winter sky, with scarlet spattered across the snowdrifts . . . and there we are, dark figures against the white snow, muffled against the cold, preserved for as long as memory and paper endure.

“What is religion?” Thoreau wrote in his journal, and immediately supplied the answer: “That which is never spoken.” One might offer the same observation about genuine love, or—as Thoreau wrote in a different context—reverence. Metaphor, parable, symbol, allegory—these ways of telling the truth slantwise provide our best means of accessing religion; these, and silence, and solitude.

So it is that our fact-obsessed age loses sight of truth. Administrations at big public universities increasingly pressure their faculties to measure students by their knowledge of facts, when what they need—what in my classes they ask for—is an education in truth. “They who know no purer sources of truth . . . stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity,” Thoreau wrote. “But they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.” Seek the source, Thoreau urges us—the foundation on which we have built our society, which some call love and some call God and some are wise enough not to name at all. And the clear implication underlying Thoreau’s directive is that this ultimate source of wisdom must be sought in silence and in solitude.

Thoreau attracts me—he continues to fascinate, because in our materialist age he offers a model for cheerfully and exuberantly living a life of poverty and chastity, without, so far as I can determine, having taken formal vows; though through his life and his writing Thoreau teaches us to reject the words “poverty” and “chastity,” with their negative connotations. What human being has exceeded Thoreau’s wealth? Who has given and received more love? I think of him as a secular monk, living a life of simplicity and right conduct—a gentler and more accurate description of his choices.

But what of obedience, the third of the traditional monastic vows that include poverty and chastity? Indeed, Thoreau practiced the hardest form of obedience—that is, obedience to his conscience. He educated himself in the contemporary manifestations of human injustice and, within the bounds of the practicable, he removed himself from their machinery. I consider the monastic vows (poverty, chastity, obedience) in this context because Thoreau serves so well as a model for a contemporary secular asceticism.

Some time in the 1990s, my mother and I were driving past the great edifice of Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani. My mother gestured at the walls. “Not in my lifetime but in yours,” she said, “you’ll drive past this place and say, ‘There used to be a monastery here.’ ” Fewer than forty monks remain at Gethsemani, down from a peak of well over two hundred in Merton’s day, and the average age is pushing seventy-five. Impossible for me to imagine that this institution, near which I grew up and which I still visit, will not be a fixture of my life—but soon enough, barring an uptick in monastic vocations, I may not have to imagine its absence.

But does ascetic practice require bricks and mortar? Did the disappearance of the culture that enabled and financed the building of the great medieval monasteries at Cluny or La Grande Chartreuse or Cîteaux or, in America, at Gethsemani mean the disappearance of the virtues they were intended to cultivate and inspire? Might contemplative traditions endure without bricks-and-mortar institutions where one may retreat from time to time in search of silence and beauty? Might the current interest in contemplative practice—meditation, yoga, centering prayer, solitude—lead to a society in which reverence, not irony, is the dominant mode? I am always conscious that many of the greatest saints of my admiration and acquaintance never darken the doors of a church—though Thoreau gave lectures in church basements, and was, not surprisingly, a great enthusiast for meditation.

The demise of monasticism has been predicted many times, and yet the impulse to contemplation—to a simple life—the impulse that led to the founding of monasteries, seems always to survive. But the model for a contemplative life of the future may be less the grand edifices of Europe, however impressive they are, or the grand edifice of the Abbey of Gethsemani, but the individual who quietly pursues a solitary contemplative practice in the privacy of her home, meeting occasionally with a small group of like-minded spirits dedicated to changing the world not through revolution but through mindfulness and compassion. In this I am comfortable with situating Thoreau among our panoply of solitary, secular American saints.