Reading Walden Slowly

Walden often turns up on lists of books university students are supposed to read. I came to it because somebody put it on a syllabus and gave me time to talk about it.

I was studying English literature at Sungkyunkwan University. The class was an introduction to ecocriticism, and Walden was one of the books that made me think about how a writer looks at the place where they live.

Thoreau’s two years at the pond

Henry David Thoreau graduated from Harvard. He went on to teach, survey land, make things and write. His two years by a pond near his hometown of Concord became the material for his best-known book.

In 1845 he moved into a small cabin he built on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land at Walden Pond. He cultivated a bean field, walked in the woods and kept track of what it took to live there. He was within reach of town and still saw people. Walden, published in 1854, gives that experiment its own shape.

A writer who makes you slow down

I thought of the Korean television programs that occasionally visit someone who has gone to live in the mountains. Their interest is often in how a person came to live that way. With Thoreau you also get what he wanted to do with the time he had made.

Professor Kim Won-jung introduced the book with a warning about what we might find on the page.

He joked that the English was demanding enough to make you wonder about the author’s first language. Thoreau could keep a sentence going for half a page, following what he had noticed in the woods long after another writer would have stopped.

The prose feels particular to the person who spent those hours outdoors and the things he wanted to keep in view.

How a pond comes into view

The Korean translation I read ran to nearly 500 pages. With so much packed into the sentences, I took a long time to finish it.

I had never been to Walden Pond. There were stretches when the descriptions made the place close enough to feel like somewhere I had spent an afternoon.

The effect comes in part from how many things Thoreau names. A bird or insect can keep his attention for a long time. Reading about it, I found myself looking more closely too.

The books Thoreau brought with him

The book was published in the nineteenth century, yet Thoreau’s reading already reached a long way beyond his immediate surroundings. I wondered how he had come by some of the works he refers to.

A Greek or Roman story can turn up near a passage that draws on Confucian thought or Indian scripture. For a reader in South Korea, there was a particular pleasure in coming across ideas that felt familiar in an unexpected setting.

I liked watching him fit his reading into an account of going to the pond or working on the house. A book he had read elsewhere could change what he made of something he saw that morning.

What are we working so hard for?

Part of the reason to read Walden is to spend time with a practical experiment. Thoreau keeps asking what a day costs and what a person gets in return for the way they spend it.

I thought about my own days, which involved classes, work and the feeling of always being due somewhere else. The stillness of the pond gave me a little distance from those demands.

What am I working so hard for? What do I want progress to make possible? Thoreau gives those questions time to become specific, and reading him slowly gave me time to ask them of myself.

Book details

Walden

Author

Henry David Thoreau

Korean edition published

August 22, 2011

ISBN-13

9788956605418

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