Passage III

HUMANITlES: Passage A is adapted from the essay ”Henry D. Thoreau“ by John Burroughs (©1882 by The Century Co.) Passage B is adapted from the essay "Qualified Homage to Thoreau” by Wallace Stegner (©1992 by the Estate of Wallace Stegner).

Passage A by John Burroughs

Thoreau's fame has steadily increased since his death, in 1862, as it was bound to do. It was little more than in the bud at that time, and its full leaf and flower­ing are not yet, perhaps not in many years yet. He improves with age; in fact, requires age to take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him. The generation he lectured so sharply will not give the same heed to his words as will the next and the next. The first effect of the reading of his books upon many minds, is irritation and disapproval; the perception of their beauty and wisdom comes later. He was a man devoid of compas­sion, devoid of sympathy, devoid of generosity, devoid of patriotism, as these words are usually understood, yet his life showed a devotion to principle such as one life in millions does not show; and matching this there runs through his works a vein of the purest and rarest poetry and the finest wisdom. For both these reasons time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his contributions. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off.

In writing of Thoreau, I am not conscious of having any criticism to make of him. l would fain accept him just as he was, and make the most of him, defining and discriminating him as I would a flower or a bird or any other product of nature一perhaps exagger­ating some features the better to bring them out. I sup­pose there were greater men among his contemporaries, but I doubt if there were any more genuine and sincere, or more devoted to ideal ends. If he was not this, that, or the other great man, he was Thoreau, and he fills his own niche well, and has left a positive and distinct impression upon the literature of his country. He was, perhaps, a little too near his friend and master, Emerson, and brought too directly under his influence. But the contour of his moral nature was just as firm and resisting. He was no more a soft-shelled egg, to be dented by every straw in the nest, than was his distin­guished neighbor.

Passage B by Wallace Stegner

Walden Woods is the 2,680-acre area outside or Boston, Mass­achusetts, that inspired Thoreau's book Walden.

Before I get around to saying why I think that Walden Woods absolutely must be preserved from sub­division and development, let me confess that, much as I admire Thoreau's hard-mouthed intellectual integrity and his knotty grappler's mind, I have some reservations about him. There are writings of his that I admire more than Walden一the essay ''Walking,'' for example, which is superb from first line to last, and "Civil Disobedience," though this latter is as explosive as dyna­mite caps, and should not be left around where children might find it and play with it. Reading Walden, I am alternately exhilarated and exasperated, as some of the author's contemporaries were with the man himself. In one paragraph he may say something thal has been waiting a thousand years to be said so well; in the next he is capable of something so outrageous that it sets my teeth on edge.

With the Thoreau who observed and participated in nature, the Thoreau who loved wildness, and the Thoreau who trusted physical labor so long as it was not a compulsion, and who mistrusted material ambi­tion, I am completely in accord. It is Thoreau the mor­alizing enemy of the tradition to which he owes all his own authority who puts me off.

Like any zealot, he is intemperate. At times he sounds perilously like his spiritual descendants of the 1960s, who trusted no one over thirty and believed that they existed outside of and were exempt from, the society they were protesting. What I miss in him, as I missed it in the more extreme rebels of the 1960s, is the acknowledgment that their society shaped them, that without it every individual of them would be a sort of Sasquatch, a solitary animal without language, thought, tradition, obligation, or commitment. It is culture, tradition, that teaches us to be human, teaches us almost everything, including how to protest and what to protest about.

I never hear Thoreau admitting this一in fact, he often specifically denies it, and his denials raise my temperature. "How about a little well deserved humility?" I feel like asking him. It is like arguing with a television screen, but it eases the mind.

The fact is, it is precisely Thoreau's repudiation of the dead hand of the past that makes him so excruciat­ingly America. He pretends to believe that all experience is not merely fruitless, but damaging. "Men think they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure," he remarks in Walden. "l have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."