House-Building and House-Holding at Walden

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Like many people who have done their own carpentry, Henry David was ready to say that he had built his own house at Walden. Just after he gave up his Walden life and returned to town, he told a Harvard classmate, have lived in Concord woods alone ... in a house built entirely by myself (Correspondence 186). title page first edition Walden introduced readers not to author, or lake, but to house, through his sister Sophia's sketch. In opening sentence Walden, he says again lived alone, in woods ... in a house which I had built myself, on shore Walden His phrasing gives precedence to built house, forming with pond not a magic circle at Walden, but an ellipse, doublecentered. Though he devotes comparatively little direct attention to it in his book, that house remains one most vital images Thoreau's sojourn at Walden. It is human center without which lake cannot be imagined. Walden demands its physical reference points. In chapters 10 and 11 Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell shows how visiting Walden Pond has become essential to anyone who takes Walden seriously. In 1872 visitors began placing stones on a cairn at what was thought to be house's site, as tokens commemoration and communion. W. B. Yeats's Waldeninspired poem, The Lake Isle Innisfree;' imagines first his cottage, of clay and wattles (139) (and a bean field), before turning to lapping waters lake. At pond today granite' pillars mark where house stood. Not far away is a furnished replica, whose manufacturer, Bensonwood, offers for sale a Thoreau Cabin Kit. more self-reliant can get plans from Society's shop nearby. Writers seeking artistic solitude crave such a house; and, if they build one, they too write it up, with references to Walden. (1) Walden house is indeed what Gaston Bachelard termed a dream image: in reading it, we leave off reading, and begin to imagine building it ourselves. But it must be understood as dream interfused with lumber. To spiritual was no less real than physical. This made him a figure fun to some his neighbors. Likewise physical was no less real than spiritual: this made him a figure awe to less manually adept Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Bronson Alcott. Even to call him a Transcendentalist is to underplay carefully observed and circumstantial style much his writing and sense physical participation on which style is based. words have grown out things and his handling them. If you front a fact, he said, you will see sunlight glimmer on both its surfaces, material and spiritual. (2) In Walden especially, his descriptions an outward and sensible world convey an inward and spiritual life, not imposed upon things and actions but discovered within them. divine energy that expresses itself in nature has also endowed our language with a power to show forth that spiritual dimension (306-07). It is not nature only that is holy; human action, when grounded in nature, may be holy as well. Protestant that he was (a protestant d outrance, said Emerson), sometimes resorted to Christian idea sacrament to describe those double-sided facts when they arose not from nature but from human practice. Whenever humans shape their actions in response not to mere necessity but in concert with that divine, expressive energy, deed and its outcomes are sacraments As with almost all his references to Christian scripture or Westminster Catechism, must disempower term in order to empower it. (3) Puckishly he cites not Catechism but the dictionary to define a sacrament: 'an outward and visible sign an inward and spiritual grace' (68). (4) For baptism perdured as bathing, while Supper became wild berries gathered and eaten in fields, or, inverted, became fasting. …