1853 The book, printed at the author’s own expense by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s publisher in 1849 after failing to interest a commercial publisher, was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. ‘I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes’, Thoreau noted ruefully in his journal after taking the books home, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself’.
A Week purported to be a travel journal of a trip that Henry made in 1839 with his brother John, in a sort of camping dinghy. From their home in Concord, Massachusetts, they sailed and paddled down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, thence up the Merrimack River to Concord, New Hampshire – and back.
Only three years later John died of lockjaw at the age of 27. Henry, devastated, decided to retire for a spell to a piece of land that Emerson owned on Walden Pond, just a mile and a half from Concord. There he built a hut out of surplus lumber and lived – on and off – for two years (see also 23 July).
While there, Thoreau set about completing his loving tribute to his brother. The problem with A Week is that it really had very little to say of John, or their relationship – and not even much about the particulars of the river trip. Or rather, a concrete observation, like ‘We passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon’, would shift gears to a slightly whimsical abstraction – ‘An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe’ – after which he moves the reader on to Pindar’s account of the island of Thera, and how the sun god Helios felt when he first looked down on Rhodes – all embellished by eighteen lines of poetry. Learned? You bet. But no one could wish it longer.
As he wrote A Week at Walden, Thoreau continued to keep his journal. Over time, what emerged was his masterpiece, Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854) – equally meditative as A Week, equally allusive, and still quoting the ancients, but this time more within the gravity of the natural world around him. The sight of a striped snake, still in its ‘torpid state’ in the March cold, tempts him to a very New-England moralisation (see 15 August):
It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition, but if they could feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.
But that’s not the end of the snake, as it would be in a conventional sermon. Instead Thoreau returns to the concrete scene:
I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the first of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
That movement in and out between the specific and general, that apparently haphazard plotting by the motions of nature rather than the preacher’s agenda, is what sets Walden apart from A Week. At Walden Pond Thoreau wrote one bad book while learning how to write a much better one.