Abstract

For a book that implores its readers to “simplify, simplify,” Walden has more than its fair share of obscurity. Lovers of simplicity have long mined it for its clear and comforting maxims, only to leave behind more than a few tough nuts for those who incline towards the esoteric—which, for Thoreau, is the essence of the philosophical. To the former set of readers he offers an apology: “You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.” To the latter he offers advice: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” The mysteries of the best books, Thoreau insists, are revealed only to those who, through their patience and persistence, prove themselves worthy of their teachings. “The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have” (p. 83). Thoreau’s Walden, I mean to show, was both conceived and meant to be read as just such a heroic book, not only because of its author’s “epic ambition” to create a national literature, but also because a unique understanding of heroism is the subject of its most esoteric chapters.