Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Importance of Self-Reliance
Four years before Thoreau embarked on his Walden project,
his great teacher and role model Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an enormously
influential essay entitled “Self-Reliance.” It can be seen as a statement
of the philosophical ideals that Thoreau’s experiment is meant to
put into practice. Certainly self-reliance is economic and social
in Walden Pond: it is the principle that in matters
of financial and interpersonal relations, independence is more valuable
than neediness. Thus Thoreau dwells on the contentment of his solitude, on
his finding entertainment in the laugh of the loon and the march of
the ants rather than in balls, marketplaces, or salons. He does
not disdain human companionship; in fact he values it highly when
it comes on his own terms, as when his philosopher or poet friends come
to call. He simply refuses to need human society. Similarly, in economic
affairs he is almost obsessed with the idea that he can support
himself through his own labor, producing more than he consumes,
and working to produce a profit. Thoreau does not simply report
on the results of his accounting, but gives us a detailed list of expenditures
and income. How much money he spent on salt from 1845 to 1847 may
seem trivial, but for him it is not. Rather it is proof that, when
everything is added up, he is a giver rather than a taker in the
economic game of life.
As Emerson’s essay details, self-reliance can be spiritual
as well as economic, and Thoreau follows Emerson in exploring the
higher dimensions of individualism. In Transcendentalist thought
the self is the absolute center of reality; everything external
is an emanation of the self that takes its reality from our inner
selves. Self-reliance thus refers not just to paying one’s own bills,
but also more philosophically to the way the natural world and humankind
rely on the self to exist. This duality explains the connection
between Thoreau the accountant and Thoreau the poet, and shows why
the man who is so interested in pinching pennies is the same man
who exults lyrically over a partridge or a winter sky. They are
both products of self-reliance, since the economizing that allows
Thoreau to live on Walden Pond also allows him to feel one with
nature, to feel as though it is part of his own soul.
The Value of Simplicity
Simplicity is more than a mode of life for Thoreau; it
is a philosophical ideal as well. In his “Economy” chapter, Thoreau
asserts that a feeling of dissatisfaction with one’s possessions
can be resolved in two ways: one may acquire more, or reduce one’s
desires. Thoreau looks around at his fellow Concord residents and
finds them taking the first path, devoting their energies to making
mortgage payments and buying the latest fashions. He prefers to
take the second path of radically minimizing his consumer activity.
Thoreau patches his clothes instead of buying new ones and dispenses
with all accessories he finds unnecessary. For Thoreau, anything
more than what is useful is not just an extravagance, but a real
impediment and disadvantage. He builds his own shack instead of
getting a bank loan to buy one, and enjoys the leisure time that
he can afford by renouncing larger expenditures. Ironically, he
points out, those who pursue more impressive possessions actually
have fewer possessions than he does, since he owns his house outright,
while theirs are technically held by mortgage companies. He argues
that the simplification of one’s lifestyle does not hinder such
pleasures as owning one’s residence, but on the contrary, facilitates
them.
Another irony of Thoreau’s simplification campaign is
that his literary style, while concise, is far from simple. It contains
witticisms, double meanings, and puns that are not at all the kind
of New England deadpan literalism that might pass for literary simplicity. Despite
its minimalist message, Walden is an elevated text
that would have been much more accessible to educated city-dwellers than
to the predominantly uneducated country-dwellers.
The Illusion of Progress
Living in a culture fascinated by the idea of progress
represented by technological, economic, and territorial advances,
Thoreau is stubbornly skeptical of the idea that any outward improvement
of life can bring the inner peace and contentment he craves. In
an era of enormous capitalist expansion, Thoreau is doggedly anti-consumption,
and in a time of pioneer migrations he lauds the pleasures of staying
put. In a century notorious for its smugness toward all that preceded
it, Thoreau points out the stifling conventionality and constraining
labor conditions that made nineteenth-century progress possible.
One clear illustration of Thoreau’s resistance to progress
is his criticism of the train, which throughout Europe and America
was a symbol of the wonders and advantages of technological progress. Although
he enjoys imagining the local Fitchburg train as a mythical roaring
beast in the chapter entitled “Sounds,” he generally seems peeved
by the encroachment of the railway upon the rustic calm of Walden
Pond. Like Tolstoy in Russia, Thoreau in the United States dissents
from his society’s enthusiasm for this innovation in transportation,
seeing it rather as a false idol of social progress. It moves people
from one point to another faster, but Thoreau has little use for
travel anyway, asking the reason for going off “to count the cats in
Zanzibar.” It is far better for him to go vegetate in a little corner of
the woods for two years than to commute from place to place unreflectively.
