Henry David Thoreau was no better than somebody's rolled-beanie nepo baby boyfriend
As much as we romanticize Walden Pond, it's time to BFFR: Only certain people get to take a sabbatical from the capitalist machine.
I attended Syracuse University for undergrad. I was a freshman when the Princeton Review bestowed upon it the moniker of “No. 1 Party School.” I have seen my fair share of Natty Light-guzzling frat boys; for what seemed like years, the synth riffs of “Closer” by the Chainsmokers echoed throughout campus like the bells of Notre-Dame. But I’ve also borne witness to a different type of archetypal young man.
Carhartt jacket, cargos bought for cheap ($250) off Grailed, parents with a second residence in New England: enter the “softboy,” the long-studied false foil to a “f*ckboy.” He could charm you by getting the bill on your overpriced oat milk latte and wow you by mansplaining Sylvia Plath. He’s not like other boys: he has Lana Del Rey in his Liked Songs and will cheat on you with another blunt-bang, overall-and-Bean-boot-wearing bisexual feminist.
And the more I read about the farce that is the Walden Pond story, the more my fight-or-flight response is activated. I have concluded Henry David Thoreau was one of those rolled-beanie, herbal cigarette, part-time DJ types.
“Of course he quit his job and moved to Walden Pond”
— Thoreau’s spring situationship, probably
2015, 1845 — it’s all the same. On July 4th of the latter, this 27-year-old f*ckboy erected a house on the shores of Walden Pond, Massachusetts. The goal of the Walden Pond experiment: write a book and live off the grid.
By all accounts, he did live the cottagecore dream. A snippet from Britannica’s entry on Thoreau’s relocation.
From the outset the move gave him profound satisfaction. Once settled, he restricted his diet for the most part to the fruits and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted.
When not busy weeding his bean rows and trying to protect them from hungry groundhogs or occupied with fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading, and writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
He also made entries in his journals, which he later polished and included in Walden. Much time, too, was spent in meditation.
We all know somebody who was stressed AF and partied too hard in New York, or who was too beautiful and charismatic in Los Angeles, and just needed a break from it all, right? A week in Tulum, a week in Turks and Caicos, a week in the Virgin or Grand Cayman Islands — you know the vibes.
Just like the super-rich kids who found themselves “unplugging” in Bali, Thoreau had a social safety net woven into his retreat: The house he built on the property of a friend who happened to already be an “influential” public figure: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And just like many 20-something dudes of today, Thoreau’s mama was doing chores for him.
One can’t be a nepo baby in a vacuum. Thoreau’s mom, unfortunately, plays a role in my disdain for this Masshole and the way he has been praised as some kind of anticapitalist revolutionary.
I’m not the first one to dredge up this pre-modern drama: It appears in August 2019, the girls were clowning Thoreau up and down X, formerly known as Twitter, for the way his mom helped him out at Walden Pond.
During that dragging era, author Austin Kleon cataloged attempts to “exonerate” Thoreau — mainly in the form of other authors dunking on critics dunking on Thoreau for letting his mama do his laundry, allegedly. Maybe it’s because my body kept score from Syracuse, but I have to agree with writer Emma Davey’s perspective on this one. This nugget of history is believable because, um, have you ever met a 27-year-old man who comes from privileged background?
But also, it’s a jumping-off point for well-documented, oft-uncovered anthropological truth: “Many other ‘genius’ men in history lived successful lives built off the invisible labor of the women in their lives,” Davey wrote in 2019. (The writer also mentions how Pablo Picasso’s granddaughter put him on blast for the way he treated his IRL muses like they were disposable. Albert Einstein was, arguably, also an *sshole.)
Also, just how off-the-grid was homeboy?
The most damning bit of evidence against the Walden Pond fantasy is proximity to bustling society, and how much Thoreau actually engaged in all of that. In The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz writes:
In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters.
Thoreau could stroll from his cabin to his family home, in Concord, in twenty minutes, about as long as it takes to walk the fifteen blocks from Carnegie Hall to Grand Central Terminal. He made that walk several times a week, lured by his mother’s cookies or the chance to dine with friends.
These facts he glosses over in “Walden,” despite detailing with otherwise skinflint precision his eating habits and expenditures. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother and sisters (who brought along more undocumented food) and downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time.
Imagine, à la that trending TikTok sound of Miles Teller breaking up with his girlfriend in Whiplash, that your spring situationship tells you he wants to focus on his writing career. Work on himself; write a book to honor his late brother. Find himself in the woods; connect with nature. And you find out from a friend of a friend he’s 20 minutes down the road inviting other girls over to the house on the Pond. When I tell you I’d be sick…
Why I’m making it hot for Thoreau
I promise you I’m going somewhere with all of this.
Yes, I can admit I sound bitter. Why am I coming for Thoreau’s neck like this after more than a decade since I last seriously studied his work?
First and foremost: None of my ancestors had the luxury of going to chill in the woods, unbothered, on a friend’s property. So pardon me if I don’t absolutely swoon at the Walden Pond experiment, especially with additional historical context.
I hate that Thoreau’s work is held up as a quaint little moment in the American literature canon, but most American kids don’t have the freedom to not dream of labor. In public school and private school alike, we also receive little tools to navigate the actual American workforce.
Even now — especially now, in this economy and in this digital-first world — I hate that few Americans have the luxury to go chill in the woods, unbothered. And the empath in me knows that even the rich — who can take two weeks off of work to wander barefoot onto finished decks and watch, with a cup of matcha in hand, deer graze at the edge of their property — would have a hard time disentangling themselves from the tentacles of the capitalist machine that brought them there.
So for now, I’ll think about some New England nepo baby 27-year-old who, riding the success of his family’s graphite company, deciding to hit up a Harvard homie to “get away from it all” and just… sigh.
Sources:
Britannica: “Move to Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau”
Bust Magazine: “Twitter drags Thoreau, whose mom brought him sandwiches to Walden Pond”
Lists of Note, “You will stop talking to me if I request it: Einstein’s demands”
Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation: “Two Years, Two Months, and Two Days”
The New Yorker, “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau”
The Paris Review, “How Picasso bled the women in his life for art”