A new novel puts Henry David Thoreau at its center and reveals what he was really searching for when he went off to live alone.
One summer evening, in the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau threw a party—a melon party, to be precise, a long-standing tradition of his earthy, garden-loving family. His table, I imagine, looked like a New England take on a Dutch still life: According to a neighbor’s diary, he laid out “sunflowers, cornstalks, beet leaves & squash blossoms … forty-six melons, fifteen different kinds; apples, all the production of his garden.” But chatter at the party wasn’t limited to Thoreau’s prodigious green thumb. His mother, Cynthia, had previously been spreading around town that her son found parties loathsome, even contemptible—he was, after all, a man who enjoyed his peace. But now, after the large gathering, she felt she had to apologize for the mild slander. It turns out that Thoreau, a godfather of the myth of American individualism, was misunderstood even by his own mother: He wasn’t the solitary grump that the world made him out to be.
In Followed by the Lark, a luscious novel from Helen Humphreys, Thoreau doesn’t throw any parties, but he does attend a few. He also gathers gangs of friends for berry-picking, and recruits new confidants for excursions to Cape Cod and Mount Katahdin. Humphreys offers a fresh view of a philosopher thought of as a loner, depicting his family home as a place for communion and companionship: His parents and siblings amiably read aloud to one another in the evenings; Thoreau and his sister Sophia track together the emergence of each bird and flower in the spring. “It would be a much lonelier world,” he thinks, “without Sophia there to share the hummingbird, the snipe, the catkin, and peepers.” Thoreau’s famously long walks around his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, are chances to ask farmers about their growing season and exchange anecdotes about woodland creatures. Even during his famously solitary days at Walden Pond, the Thoreau of Humphreys’s imagining finds himself “lying in wait” for the woodsman Alek Therien each morning, ”so they could say a few words to each other at the start of the day.”
This is Thoreau as he really lived: Humphreys closely bases her novel on Thoreau’s meticulous, 2-million-word journal, in which he sometimes covered eight or 10 pages a day with his opinions and exact movements. She’s offering us a glimpse of the Thoreau who has been papered over by his own reputation. He didn’t live a cloistered existence as the famous “Massachusetts hermit,” though no one, not even his mother, wanted to accept this fact.
There’s a special allure to solitude, by which I simply mean meaningful, extensive hours alone: that quality of time that is tempting but hard to achieve, and alarming when pushed to extremes. When solitude is taken on as a mission, like Jesus wandering alone in the desert, it’s viewed as cleansing; when it’s forced on someone, like the solitary confinement of prison, it’s a form of torture. Parents of young children beg for it; some elderly pray for ways to ameliorate it.
Finding just the right balance of aloneness versus togetherness is at the root of our modern obsession with navigating social interaction. Ghosting, FOMO (or its opposite, JOMO—Joy of Missing Out), remote work—our conversations about all of these are adjacent to the questions about solitude that have been bubbling up in the American psyche for decades, if not centuries. According to the social scientists Luke Fernandez and Susan J. Matt, 19th-century Americans “had more modest expectations about the number of friendships they should have and considered loneliness an inescapable part of the human condition.” As new technologies arrived, Americans imagined that they could moderate their alone time with telegraphs, railroad trips, phone calls, FaceTime chats. But that was an empty sales pitch: According to many studies, we’re now lonelier than ever before.
Many of us desperately want to understand what is the normal amount of solitude a person should want and have. Because Thoreau’s writing is so focused on his excursions as a lone wanderer, and because he sings like a jay about his solo tromps through the forest, it’s easy to cast him as a recluse. He has a tidy story inside the mythology of American literature. He’s taught in high school via a bundle of Walden aphorisms—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” and so on. His biography is related, with Walden at its center, thus: On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved to his pondside hut, where he lived as his truest self. He then published an autobiography of the experience, crowing about the discoveries that await us if only we eschew companionship and cozy up to the toadstools and lichen of the forest. Bagged together with Emerson, Thoreau has become a particular archetype of the rugged American: he who can do all things for himself and by himself. But at a young age he had declared, “To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present.” It was his control over his hours, and not over his company, that defined his philosophy.
In her spectacular 2017 biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls marshaled a regiment of facts to combat the idea that Thoreau lived a lonely existence. Thoreau spent only two of his 44 years by himself—at Walden. He chose a home full of bustle and chatter. As a token of his friendship (and for pay; the man wasn’t a martyr), he spent long stretches, including immediately after leaving Walden Pond, living with Emerson’s wife and children while the great man toured Europe; he and Lidian Emerson sat together every evening, tittering about the children and going over the household ledgers. On what he thought would be his last night on Earth, Thoreau asked for his oldest friend to share his bed, so he could be ushered out of the world with another warm heart beside his own.
Followed by the Lark, written in verdant little fragments that tell Thoreau’s life story from childhood to the moment of death, follows Dassow Walls’s course and reframes Walden as one variation in his life, instead of its peak. It was his most famous experiment, but it was hardly his only one. If the work of your life, as Thoreau’s was, is determining what it means to “front only the essential facts”—to ensure that at every moment you are really living, and not just being—variety is crucial to guaranteeing the validity of the results. Thoreau spent a few months at the home of the Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, teaching and apprenticing. He lived on Staten Island with Emerson’s brother, tutoring and commuting to Manhattan to sell magazine subscriptions door to door. And his first attempt at living with nature as his “withdrawing room” was done with a friend: At 21, Thoreau and Charles Stearns Wheeler built a shanty on a different Concord pond and spent the summer there. As Humphreys puts it, they “wanted to unburden themselves of society in order to become wild children again and receive the holiness of clouds and rocks and water.”
From the archive: Alfred Kazin on Thoreau and American power
Of course, he did go to Walden Pond alone. He did spend much of his days befriending a mouse that lived under his floorboards. But he also entertained his family every Saturday he lived on the pond, and visited them every Sunday. He moved back into their house for weeks while his was winterized. The cabin itself, that famously tight-shingled 10-by-15-foot monastery in miniature, was so visible from a nearby path that his fellow Concordians noted in their diaries how many visitors “Henry T” received—and how happy he was to have them.
As a friend who lives alone in rural Vermont recently explained to me, “When people say they want solitude, what they usually really mean is they want privacy.” Thoreau had a (single) room of his own at Walden, but what he really discovered in his two years, two months, and two days living there was not that reclusiveness was a balm, but that holding on to your time was. After all, as Emerson wrote in Thoreau’s obituary in this magazine, “as soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it.” He didn’t have to, but Thoreau left Walden, and never lived alone again.
The myth of Thoreau has a gloss to it, like an ugly varnish applied to delicate wooden furniture; it’s a way to attract more viewers with its shine. (Not shockingly, according to Dassow Walls, it was the newspaperman Horace Greeley who coined the nickname “Massachusetts hermit” and cultivated Thoreau’s strange celebrity, in order to sell papers.) Imagine what we can make of Thoreau when we wipe it off.
His journal, all 7,000 pages of it, frequently discusses his desire to be alone, but for two very particular reasons: the first is that he had no equal in his attention to the woods and fields; as for the second, he wrote, “I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it.” The “art of life” became the work of his life. “We are receiving a portion of the infinite,” he declared in 1851, a reminder to himself about the preciousness of his minutes. Childhood, he notes, is a period of “emancipation”—“a half a day of liberty … was like the promise of life eternal.” So he shrugged off a profession that would have eaten up his days, any habits of consumption, and the quickening pace of the world, which he saw in the telegraph lines freshly strung up across town and in the train that blasted past Walden Pond, lighting the underbrush on fire. He wrote in his journal, “If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for.”
Thoreau was prescient in many ways—in his environmentalism, his abolitionism, his quest to understand how Native Americans had been unjustly murdered and sent off their own land. He also saw before most that the rural American way of life was coming to an end: Developers were clear-cutting the woods; the train was turning the countryside into a commuter’s paradise. In turn, he guarded his schedule more dearly.
Simple living wasn’t preferable to Thoreau because it granted him purity of some kind; it opened up nearly every second of his day. Working as a land surveyor meant roaming the fields and forest freely instead of hunkering down at a desk or in an office. (It helped that he paid rent at the family home and could therefore count on meals and washing.) Walden had given him solitude, sure, but it also let him learn how to function on his own clock, without the presence of his friends’ or family’s expectations. He wanted to dole out his time “poorly”—at least according to evolving industrial society—because that meant sniffing the dirt and raising beans and unwinding ferns and tracking the first freeze at the pond. “Spending all his hours there made him a pioneer—not a Western one, but an inward one,” Dassow Walls writes. Solitude wasn’t the end goal; it was a mechanism to turn on his powers of attention. After all, Thoreau’s greatest gift was his deep, focused noticing.
To gripe about lost or mismanaged or unproductive time is to be American. We’ve even found ways to turn our hobbies into work (the side hustle) and leisure into accomplishment (self-care). But for the past century and a half, we could have had before us the example of a man who railed that “there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living”—a real anti-capitalist king.
Read: Remembering Thoreau and the Black residents of Concord
Once he’d left Walden behind, in the following 15 years of his short life, Thoreau changed his writing and living style almost entirely: Instead of having an experience and then writing about it, he wrote while he lived, on the road with his pencils and in his attic at night. Thoreau turned the experience of being himself into something that happened in the present. If we take away anything about what it means to go to Walden, it should be this: By the time Thoreau finally wrote about his life at the pond, years after he had experienced it, he’d realized that one gains virtue not by leaving society—society and nature and the individual are far too enmeshed for that—but by standing inside the moment, and opening your arms to more.
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