Geomedia
Books:
Rediscovering the Science Behind Thoreau’s “Walden”
John-Manuel Andriote
L
ast summer, I had the opportunity to enjoy a personal tour
around the world’s most famous
kettle pond, Walden Pond in
Concord, Mass., led by geologist Robert
Thorson, who recently authored the book
“Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau
and Nineteenth-Century Science.” The
rainy, gray day did not diminish our hike
or Thorson’s delight in sharing what he
had learned from his research into Henry
David Thoreau’s lifelong fascination with
Walden Pond and the science behind his
iconic book, “Walden.”
During the Quaternary Period, the
Concord area was covered four times
by thick sheets of glacial ice, and several previous versions of Walden
likely existed between glaciations. The
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published his account of communing
with nature while he lived alone at
Walden Pond for two years, two
months and two days.
Credit: Walden Woods Project
current Walden Pond formed when the
last of those ice sheets retreated some
16,000 years ago, leaving a mass of glacial ice buried in a depression between
two faults. As the ice melted, it formed a
sinkhole that tapped into the water table,
and filled up. Walden Pond isn’t fed or
drained by streams, but is instead “basically a well,” Thorson says, replenished
by groundwater — its unusually clear
waters filtered through innumerable
tons of sand and gravel.
By the time Thoreau — who made
his living as a land surveyor and pencil-maker — submitted his Walden
manuscript, early in the spring of 1854,
he had been visiting Walden Pond for
more than 20 years, almost daily for
the last 10 of those years. From 1845 to
1847, he had lived in his famous rustic
house in the woods by the pond — built
on land owned by his good friend and
Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson — for “two years, two months, and
two days.”
Thoreau tried to understand the world
as he found it expressed in Concord’s
surrounding forests and waterways, and
nothing fascinated him more than the
sources and seasonal cycles of Walden
Pond. To better understand it, he read
the work of the leading scientists of the
day. Nothing shook up Thoreau’s thinking quite like the writings of Charles
Darwin, including “Voyage of the Beagle” and “On the Origin of Species.”
Few recall that Darwin was primarily
considered a geologist for his entire career
before “On the Origin of Species” was
published. Thoreau was drawn to Darwin’s
work as strongly as he had previously been
put off by local New England geologists.
“He despised these ‘Men of Science’ —
those wealthy enough to indulge their
interest — because they were caught up
in the Christian theories of creation and
catastrophism,” Thorson says.
“Walden’s Shore: Henry David
Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century
Science,” by Robert M. Thorson,
Harvard University Press, 2014, ISBN
9780674724785
Under the influence of Darwin’s ideas,
Thoreau began to think about the origins
of life from non-life. “There is nothing
inorganic,” he later wrote. “Surely, this is
Walden’s most important line,” Thorson
writes in “Walden’s Shore,” as he describes
how Thoreau made the connection
between geology and biology. “Thoreau’s
insight regarding the origin of life and its
corollary of continuous creation stood in
diametric opposition to the ‘dead history’
of catastrophism, then the prevailing paradigm” he says. Thoreau “plainly saw”
that Earth’s crust “was not the residue
of something that has happened. It is
the ultimate raw material for everything
that is happening in the present moment.
Ancient rock must be destroyed so that
new rock can rise again.”
Eventually Thoreau’s pious neighbors
condemned him as an atheist — and a
heathen to boot — because his scientific
exploration led him to conclusions that
page 48 • April 2015 • EARTH • www.earthmagazine.org
Geomedia
Walden Pond in Concord, Mass.
Credit: John-Manuel Andriote
put him at odds with the prevailing Christian notions of the origins of Earth and
humanity. For example, Edward Hitchcock, the state geologist of Massachusetts
at the time, believed the New England
landscape originated from tsunami-like
floods from the Arctic, not from the action
of ice sheets. “Thoreau wanted nothing
to do with catastrophism,” Thorson says.
As Thoreau read the scientists’ books,
his own way of thinking became more
scientific. Biographers and scholars who
study Thoreau have noted a shift in his
written descriptions of natural phenomena, which progressed over time from
metaphorical to literal. As a self-taught
naturalist — a “good field scientist,” as
Thorson puts it — Thoreau understood
groundwater hydrology, ecology, meteorology, geology and limnology.
But Thoreau wasn’t content merely to
understand why things worked as they
do. “His purpose in Walden is to take
us down all these branches of divergent
complexity, including human spirituality,” writes Thorson.
Thorson explains that the difference between Thoreau’s detailed
scientific records and observations in
his journals, and the ultimate book
“Walden,” emerged from the way the
writer processed his observations, a
method that Thorson likens to threshing wheat. “Thoreau let the chaff of
his scientific methodology blow away
as the grains of literary truth fell to
the threshing floor. At each step of
refinement — notes, journal, lecture,
essay, book — the scientific content of
the text diminishes.”
This winnowing process in his writing, and in his beliefs, led Thoreau to a
deeper, more refined and better articulated understanding of nature — and to
a spirituality that couldn’t be contained
in traditional religious concepts and
images. For this reason, Thorson says
Thoreau could be better understood as
being “descendental”; “transcendental”
suited him less well.
As a younger man, he says, Thoreau
accepted “Emerson’s big idea that nature
was a collection of natural facts awaiting
correspondence with spiritual facts.” But
as he moved toward the 1854 publication of “Walden,” the “transcendentalist”
label no longer fit. Thorson describes
Thoreau’s book as leading readers on
a very different journey, “one that is
descending inward toward the simplicity of a lower heaven in Walden’s
waters, rather than ascending to an outward heaven.”
Or in Thoreau’s words — which Thorson uses as the epigraph of “Walden’s
Shore” — “If you have built castles in
the air, your work need not be lost; that
is where they should be. Now put the
foundations under them.”
Andriote is an author, journalist and
speaker based in Connecticut who
has written for The Atlantic and Huffington Post. He last wrote for EARTH
in a June 2014 cover story on the
geologic history of New England’s
stone walls. More of his work can be
found at: http://jmandriote.com.
page 49 • April 2015 • EARTH • www.earthmagazine.org