Turning to Thoreau for Lessons on Living Through Difficult Times

If you have been exposed often to Thoreau, you may be tired of him—his privilege and community in the backdrop of the short period of asceticism that he is most known for. Thoreau was a young, single, educated, able-bodied white man with a family business (pencil making) to return to—easy for him to build a cabin (on Emerson’s land), and to exhort us all to “Simplify!”

I read Walden deeply for the first time when I was a working mother with two young daughters. During those years I would find myself awake in the middle of the night (even when the girls were sleeping), with the house finally quiet, tiptoeing down the stairs to sit by the gas fire, sidestepping the wooden barn with plastic ponies lined up at the fence—my only solitude. I kept a journal, and sometimes would read.

I chose Thoreau partly, in retrospect, as another way to beat myself up for not being more attentive, deliberate, grateful, patient, and just better, at, well, everything. His self-righteous judgements seemed an all-too honest assessment, the “lives of quiet desperation” apparent in the faces of many of the suburban mothers I knew, the stay-at-home “neighborhood ladies” as I called them, along with my dear friends, burdened by too many daily tasks and also, and maybe more so, by being too needed. Anchored to children, job, spouse, parents, house, pets; responsibilities both real and self-imposed (did we all really need to host those elaborate preschool birthday parties?). As mothers, we were completely unable to ‘follow the bent of [our] crooked genius’. Thoreau’s judgments felt personal, and so true. “Our life,” he writes, “is frittered away by detail.”

I am turning again to Thoreau, to a lesser known part of his story, for some kind of an answer about how to live in difficult times.

I read with a kind of lust for the simplicity of the mid-19th century: wandering in black nights, losing one’s way even through town (“it is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose”), for blessed sleep, followed by wakeful mornings (“every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity”). In a distorted and sleep-deprived haze of envy, I read chapters titled Sounds, and Solitude.

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves.

What I wouldn’t have traded for an afternoon and forenoon (whatever that is) and long evening of many thoughts unfolding themselves. I felt so distant from myself, seeking in his elevated language a balm for some restless sadness that I couldn’t quite shake. But instead of being soothed, I used his prose to stoke envy, anger at the world, relishing his scathing indictments of “modern life” (still so relevant), and feed my own sense that I was failing at everything, but mostly at “living deep, as living is so dear.”

When our youngest was two, my husband was invited to teach a workshop at a remote wilderness center bordering the Wrangel St. Elias National Park in Alaska. I asked if I could tag along, leaving our two girls home with their grandmother. For ten blessed days I sat alone by the river, peed in the woods, showered outside, drank water from a spring in the ground, ate fresh vegetarian soups, stared into the blue of the Root glacier listening to the water flowing underneath the ice.

I realized that like Thoreau, I felt myself special, my life worth more than what it seemed to be amounting to, struggling with a sense that I was made for more. In the wild of Alaska, looking down from the small plane at the mountain goats, barely discernable against the white of the snow, perched on the rocks (and grazing of all things), I felt small again, proportional. And coming home felt good; to recognize I didn’t just feel needed, I actually was needed, and that suddenly seemed important.

And now twelve years later, my daughters mostly grown, I find myself again longing for a hut in the woods, a blessed way out of the ongoing difficulty of how to make a meaningful life, a way out of the responsibility to others that I feel so keenly, having been raised in the Mennonite tradition in which service to others is valorized above all else, by a father who everyone praised as a humanitarian, who crafted himself as a savior to poor children, helpless animals, in the visage of Jesus, but who was filled with deep and difficult contradictions (his selflessness was in the end just a way of meeting his own needs), some of which I fear I must have inherited too.

I find myself, after a series of career stops and starts, in a “helping” profession, as the director of a local office for a national refugee resettlement agency, an international humanitarian relief agency, at the beginning of the second Trump administration, at the dawn of DOGE and ICE, a deeply disturbing repetition of aggression towards immigrants in the US that risks ending again in mass violence.

I am turning again to Thoreau, to a lesser known part of his story, for some kind of an answer about how to live in difficult times. If history is repetition, then prophets of the past must have something to teach us. Thoreau was an abolitionist, aided in the Underground Railroad, was the first to speak out on behalf of John Brown. His sister Helen was a friend to Frederick Douglass, who often came to Concord on the invitation of the “female anti-slavery society” to speak on a stage that Henry also sometimes shared, along with Emerson and others of their circle. He writes in his journals in 1854, just after Massachusetts enacted the fugitive slave law that required returning escaped slaves to their oppressors:

June 16 [1854]: . . . Every man in New England capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have lived the last three weeks with the sense of having suffered a vast, indefinite loss. I had never respected this government, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, attending to my private affairs, and forget it. . . .  I dwelt before in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell . . . if there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our people, I feel curious to visit it. Life itself being worthless, all things with it, that feed it, are worthless.

This “vast, indefinite loss” filled with unprincipled rulers, the cruelty of the fugitive slave act—his despair feels so contemporary (the HOPE of just a few years ago ironic). And not only hatred and violence given free reign; the railroad through Concord built on the backs of immigrants, the old growth trees leveled, the industrial revolution well under way. And his time was one too of witnessing the willful destruction of entire cultures, the taking of lands, the Trail of Tears.

I find myself an ill-equipped soldier having pushed my way to the front lines. How to actually be of any use, how live well, given the state of the world, country, town, neighborhood, and my own mind. No response feels honest, feels enough.

In one of his letters to his friend Blake is a passage I keep returning to—the difficulty, the struggle, so apparent. On the eve of Walden’s publication (with the anxieties that surely entailed for him—his first book about a canoe trip with his brother, did not sell well), and coming from an antislavery rally where he read from an essay he composed for the occasion, despite his disdain for public speaking, he writes in August 1854:

I was determined that I would silence this shallow din; that I would walk in various directions and see if there was not to be found any depth of silence around. . . . I sent forth my mounted thoughts to find deep water. I left the village and paddled up the river to Fair Haven Pond. As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness.

The next image is a curious one, violent in its way:

I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned,

I too want to grasp it by the nape of the neck—some events particularly so, but it is the tide of them together that feels like more than we can collectively bear. It is not just power, but historical, intractable, and seemingly endless bigotry—this never-ending struggle against the worst in us as people, and when I say us I mean also the worst in me, a person who has benefited from this country’s historical injustices, who has inherited a legacy, a harm disguised as help. I find myself an ill-equipped soldier having pushed my way to the front lines. How to actually be of any use, how live well, given the state of the world, country, town, neighborhood, and my own mind. No response feels honest, feels enough. Thoreau continues:

and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them.

And here again is the lesson, a turning away from despair. He lets it go. But not in an airy, ephemeral way; it has the weight of a body bloated and floating down stream. Only then, he says, could he be filled with “vast hollow chambers of silence”—soothed, by “infinite stillness.”

I am reminded in reading Thoreau that he was also ill-equipped—full of contradictions, doubts, grief. People still poke fun of his ascetic, prophetic voice, noting that he lived a mile from his childhood home, had frequent guests, and once a week dinner cooked by his mother. He writes in his journals movingly of his desire for human society and his fear that he is becoming increasingly unfit for it, of his own limitations, his profound and daily struggles, even his loneliness though he rarely mentions it. He speaks frequently of friendship but never of falling love, was socially anxious and terribly awkward (by his own description), was not well-received as a writer or a lecturer, was by many standards, a failed poet.

But he loved the world, and the people in it; he had deep and lasting relationships with many friends and was close to his family, many of whom died sudden and unexpected deaths. So grieved by the death of his brother, he suffered psychosomatic symptoms and was bedridden for months. He lived increasingly in despair of the world within and around him. But always (and this it seems, must be the lesson), he makes a turn. At the beginning of the journals is a prophetic axiom that he will try to live into for the rest of his life, an axiom we would all do well to understand:

 July 25 [1838]. There is no remedy for love but to love more.

In contrast to a sometimes self-righteous hypocrite or an elevated spiritual ascetic, I find Thoreau in the journals to be funny and self-deprecating, often commenting on the shabbiness of his coat and his boots, his despair at a tooth falling out, and one of my favorite passages, his inability to keep his leather shoelaces tied: “I have for years, had a great deal of trouble with my shoestrings,” frustrated at having only learned the granny knot. And if not exactly humble, he was certainly self-critical.

Reading Thoreau is to humbly ask, over and over, how to be in the world as it is, how to bear it? The contradictions of his time, of his life, speaking uncomfortably at the lectern, writing imperfect manifestos, suffering personal losses, standing in the open doorway of the hut on Walden Pond, holding grief, listening for deeper currents, and striving to love more.