On Walden Pond

A view of Walden Pond, 2017

We are not born free. We are born as “unfree” as is possible – utterly dependent. Later we try to become free, but even that hinges on much more than our own will.

On this Fourth of July, my mind has wandered back to Walden Pond, in a beautiful part of western Massachusetts. I stopped several times over the years at the pond where Henry David Thoreau found isolation and inspiration in the 1840s and 50s. In his book “Walden” Thoreau said much about solitary life in the woods, including this:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

In 2021, Walden Pond seems a tiny pool encircled by encroaching humankind. “The wild” is no more. Today, Walden is proof that a human being has nowhere to hide, except within her mind or perhaps home.

This modern life is so tightly woven together, so interdependent, that the only freedom we have now, is the freedom we grant each other and guard for each other.

If a man or woman is to go “confidently in the direction of his dreams” it will be, in some real way, because others got out of her way, or helped him up.

That might sound dire, to those accustomed to measuring their liberty by the distance between their own choices and others’ influence. But the person who thinks they are free because they are alone, are mistaking the orange juice for the tree.

As innately interdependent and social creatures, human beings begin and end life in relative states of helplessness – overwhelmed by physical needs they cannot meet alone. In between those bookends is a life of interplay, association, trade, linkage, burden-sharing, aggregation, assembly and cooperation. Most important there is learning and teaching.

So we may “feel alone” or believe we are, fundamentally alone – we are, in our heads, but not really any place else. Even Thoreau, moored on the moonlit shore of Walden Pond, found his way there by trails that had been left behind by countless strangers’ feet, horses and wagons. Even Thoreau noted the passing strangers and fellow inhabitants of the remote woods he cleaved to.

And even Thoreau, explorer of solitude, never stopped talking – not only to the birds and trees, but to his fellow man, to the future, through his daily journal that became the book, “Walden.” For we are not really alone if we are still willing to speak, in the hope that someone, somewhere, some day, will hear us.

So it is that we find solitude in a crowd, even the imaginary crowd. So it is that we are “free” within ourselves and some reach of the physical world surrounding us: free to walk the shoreline, free to carry in the firewood, free to gaze out the window and drink in the vista or the dark.

But all that is really the freedom we give each other. We agree to let our neighbour alone. We agree to hear the occasional explosion of his toy cannon or annual fireworks, because he agrees not to be an infernal nuisance about it every night of the year. We agree to use the “eco-friendly” laundry detergent because we want the land and water around us to be pure, and because we trust our neighbour to make the same effort.

We agree to use and to accept the local currency, trusting that it will be received from us with the same enthusiasm. We agree to respect some notion of “property” because it secures for others the fruits of their labour and the means for them to live decently and relatively independently, and because we depend for our lives on others’ grant of the same freedom to us.

We agree that friends and strangers can enter a voting booth and tick whatever box they like, as they like, and that they are free to tell us or not, or lie to us if they like, about their choices. We agree to count each ballot equally and honestly, and to live with the consequences dictated by our constitutional instruments.

And so on.

It is in the web of all those agreements, that social contract we are tangled up in together, where we act out our personal version of life. So just as we are helpless and dependent at the bookends of life, so too we are rarely on our own between those two stations.

I would like to wade again into Walden Pond some day, as Thoreau so often did (and I braved, once). But the shrinking world around it and the magnetic allure of those waters has meant such crowding that the local authorities have now forbidden it, I read.

That loss has inspired a howl of protest from some. That is how most surrenders are received, of course: our experience takes root inside the mind as entitlement, our past life draws a license that we rely upon. So we object.

But just as age inevitably devours our abilities, the world seems to erode our liberties. The old, faded license becomes unreadable or can simply not be renewed. A committee of other women and men, charged with the particular duty to preserve some idea of an old pond that has become a pastoral mecca, decides that all those bathers are bruising the place too much.

That is sad to some, a relief to others, a typical balance of interests – in this case, a trade of present enjoyment for future enjoyment. We lose license but gain hope. An investment, if you will.

Which in fact is the reality and hopeful truth about all our freedoms: they are a bargain made with amongst the living, often in the interests of those yet to be born. So not alone are we that life demands a trade not only with the guy next door, but with the people who will live there next, and their kids, and on and on. We cannot even hide from the people who don’t exist yet. We will never be free of other people.

But that is a hopeful truth: ours is a reciprocal liberty. It is not “natural”, but manufactured among us, granted by one to the other, guarded by each for the other. That is as free as we can ever be.

It is no less precious for being a gift we give one another. In fact, it may be more precious for it.