Henry David Thoreau's Diary

Henry David Thoreau's Diary


Tom Bowling (by Charles Dibdin) - John Potter and the Broadside Band (performers)

(Tr. Spa-Eng from a review by Esteban Vegano)

 The writings of Henry David Thoreau; Walden, The Duty of Civil Disobedience, and in particular his famous and extensive personal diary. They are a source of genuine and vibrant spirituality, since they are the fruit of experiences resulting from an inner rich life, developed in the background of an exuberant nature. He was born and died in Concord, New England (1818-1862), and although his life was brief, it turned out to be profound and intense. There are numerous biographies that describe Thoreau with much property. This article aims to deepen into his experiences in the middle of the nature that he loved so much. 

 Thoreau lived a kind of romance with the natural environment which was, in essence, his true home. He spent long hours in close contact with the forests that surrounded his hometown Concord. He was a very simple man, and made of simplicity a real cult. He applied this simplicity to all the dimensions of his being: his clothing, his vegetarian food, his basic routine, all his life was a true hymn to the pure and simple. 

 His personal diary has real jewels of thought, scattered throughout the text. His final topic was, in essence, Beauty, which he pursued almost obsessively. In this sense, there is a thinking of Thoreau that defines his idea of Beauty:

       "So this is and will always be beauty, neither here nor there, either now or then, 
       either in Rome or in Athens, but everywhere that there is a soul who admires it.
       If I seek it far from me it is because I do not find it in myself. Sterile will be then 
       my search, because I'll never find it".

 Beauty is common and you should not travel very far to find it. Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, a human being seeking, in transcendence, to find himself. And he really trascended, as far as to be one of Gandhi's mentors. The concept of civil disobedience, which Gandhi applied on in India, is directly derived from Thoreau's writings, who, despite living most of the time in the woods, was greatly concerned with the humans' final fate. Life in society made him feel uneasy, as artificial, at the point of writing:

       "Man is the clamping, nature is freedom, man makes me want another world, 
       nature makes me conform with this"

 And in the same sense, he wrote the following:

             "Let us pay attention to the universe hours, and not to the trains hours".

 In these thoughts, Thoreau sums up his entire philosophy of life: giving oneself up to a natural life, putting the simple before the artificial, and being happy with little. He gave importance to both body and soul: "The body is the first disciple of the soul", said once. Animals were his neighbors and his ''fellowmen''. He loved them as much as the human being, that is why he dedicated to them thoughts like this:

       "Once, while I was digging a well in the garden of the field, a sparrow 
       alighted for a moment on my shoulder and I felt that I was more distinguished
       by that fact that by any epaulette which I would have been able to carry".

 He is rightly known as the first ecologist. In the mid-19th century he was already writing about the shame it caused him the fact that the most beautiful animals were disappearing from the forests he used to go. He compared this to reading an incomplete poem. For him, the whole nature was a beautiful poem that he liked to contemplate in solitude. Thoreau was the most original philosopher of solitude. Environmentalist, humanist, naturalist, surveyor, these are only conventional labels. Actually, there is not a word to define him with precision. Thoreau was an iconoclast who escapes all definition. To get an idea of what he was as a human being and as a writer you must scrutinise in the nectar oozing reading of his books. Those which bear witness that humans can and should return to a more genuine and natural way of life.