Being Comfortable with Yourself and Being Comfortable with Others: Solitary and Social Transcendence in Thoreau's Walden

Henry David Thoreau is best-known for his rugged individualism, living for a time in a cabin he built for himself near the shores of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. As a transcendentalist, Thoreau’s time alone was not merely about self-sufficiency; it was about a transcendent experience of—and communion with—the divine in nature. Although many readers of Thoreau are familiar with this aspect of his work, the connection between solitude and transcendence, they often overlook the social aspect of Thoreau’s transcendentalism.

In Thoreau’s most most famous work, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, two chapters with opposing but complementary themes are placed back-to-back by design, to emphasize the fact that transcendence can be found both in solitude and in the company of others: “Solitude” (Walden, Chapter 4) and “Visitors” (Walden, Chapter 5).

“Solitude”

In “Solitude,” Thoreau describes the importance of solitude and being comfortable with your own company, content with the sound of your own inner voice and the contents of your own thoughts. Consider the way in which Thoreau intertwines solitude, nature, and the company of his own thoughts in his experience of transcendence in the following passages:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again. (Thoreau, Walden, “Solitude”)

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. (Thoreau, Walden, “Solitude”)

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone,—but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. (Thoreau, Walden, “Solitude”)

“Visitors”

The above passages are fully compatible with the aspects of Thoreau’s transcendentalism that are popularly known and well-documented. I wish, however, to draw attention to the following complementary passages from the subsequent chapter of Walden—”Visitors.” One might walk away from having read “Solitude” with the impression that Thoreau is something of an escapist, that he holds that transcendent experiences are to be found only in solitude, and especially in that special solitude found in nature. In “Visitors,” however, Thoreau juxtaposes his prior claims about the transcendence found in solitude with his description of equally transcendent social experiences, emphasizing the importance of being comfortable alone and being comfortable with others and that transcendent experiences can be found both in solitude and in the social aspects of the human experience:

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

As for men, they will hardly fail one any where. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could any where else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

In “Visitors,” Thoreau describes at some length his encounter with a particular visitor who was of simple mind and speech yet managed to cut to the heart of particular issues as well as any learned philosopher. In the simple company of this fellow, fueled by a shared meal and the shared experience of the immediate environment, removed a distance from the hustle and bustle of Concord society, Thoreau and his visitor experienced a meeting of the minds and souls, even despite the obvious differences in linguistic and philosophical abilities and innate temperaments between them:

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

Thoreau generalizes his experience with this particular fellow to encompass the transcendent nature of his experience with nearly all of the many common-folk who would chance upon his pond-side dwelling, as if to say that one can find value in encounters with his or her fellow humans of all sorts regardless of their station in life, level of education, or intellectual capacity. Thoreau praises even his “half-witted” visitors for offering their own kind of wisdom to be shared in each other’s company:

Half-witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the so called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

In the closing paragraph of “Visitors,” Thoreau makes it sound as if his oft-misunderstood solitary experience at Walden Pond was positively cosmopolitan:

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with,—“Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!” for I had had communication with that race. (Thoreau, Walden, “Visitors”)

What can we learn about Thoreau’s almost-contradictory reflections on “Solitude” and “Visitors”? Is there a common thread to be found in both sorts of experiences—the encounter one has with oneself in times of solitude and the encounters one has with the minds and souls of others in the presence of quality company and companionship?

Both experiences are transcendent, almost metaphysical in nature. In times of solitude one communes with one’s fellow inhabitants of the Earth, of all species, from the lowest to the highest natural orders. In the company of others, one likewise communes with the minds and souls, crossing the spatial boundaries of each other’s crania to touch the very being of other people—people, interestingly enough, likewise of the lowest and highest orders of humanity, with no regard for rank, just as Thoreau communed with grubs and grebes alike in his hands-on experience of nature, whether hoeing beans or bathing in the pond. Thoreau hoed the ideas and broke the clods of his visitors’ minds, and bathed in their essences—hoeing and bathing in both the natural and the uniquely human essences, all of which Thoreau found a home for in his broad and inclusive transcendentalism.

“Reading”

Transcendence can be found in nature, yes and of course, but transcendence can be found in the company of others (cf. “Visitors”) and in many other aspects of the human experience. The varied titles of the chapters of Walden themselves speak to the many categories of transcendent experiences to be discovered and experienced, if one carves out the time and space in life to go looking for them. Consider the chapter of Walden called “Reading,” in which Thoreau characterizes reading as a mystical experience of communing with the minds of long-dead authors in a way that crosses boundaries of space, time, culture, and history.

Forgive me for the length of the passages from Thoreau’s chapter on “Reading” that I have quoted below, but do indulge me in reading them, as they collectively make my case that transcendence for Thoreau is as much about communion with others, of the living and the deceased but immortal variety, as about the experience solitude and nature. Even something as simple as reading a book—of the highest order—for Thoreau is an experience of divinity itself:

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. 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. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;—not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which he takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

Philosophical reading in particular can be thought of as participation in a centuries- and millennia-long conversation between one’s own mind and the mind of long-dead philosophers in an intellectual project that is as much about communion and immortality as it is about philosophical problems themselves:

Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him,—my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. (Thoreau, Walden, “Reading”)

Rediscovering Ourselves and Rediscovering Others

From my point of view as a philosophy instructor in today’s 21st-century culture, I am concerned that we are losing touch with both aspects of transcendence—the solitary and the social. We fill our days with 24-hour news programming, endlessly scrolling social media feeds, celebrity and “influencer” gossip, and myriad media inputs into our days and lives—films, television shows, YouTube channels, podcasts, and streaming music playlists. We have not given ourselves the silence or the solitude to get to know ourselves, to be comfortable with our own company, our own thoughts, and the sound of our own inner voices.

We likewise, though, have lost touch with our social natures as we have become more isolated in general, long before the proximate cause of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and its resulting social isolation. We have lost the gift of gab, on topics both profound and mundane. We fail to greet each other with a smile, fail to inquire about the inner working and hidden operations of our fellow human beings, and fail to search for depth in the endless but shallow sea of our average everydayness (to employ the English version of favorite phrase of Martin Heidegger—cf. Being and Time). We are faceless, nameless, and anonymous—mere noise to each other alongside the countless other sources of noise in our lives. We are merely alongside others, not truly communing or connecting with them. We have, collectively, become as uncomfortable with others as we have become with ourselves. We long to rise above the shallowness of life, but find ourself wallowing not-quite-contentedly in the shadows like hippos in the shrinking oases of the African plains.

We must get to know ourselves and each other as fellow human beings once again. As the ancient Stoics might have suggested, we must actively and intentionally seek out the solitude and the quiet to reacquaint ourselves with the consolation of our innermost selves. But we must also re-habituate ourselves, perhaps in some Aristotelian sense, to once again become genuinely social animals in the best sense of the term—seeking out others for their company, their camaraderie, their companionship, their own hidden depths, and the joint experience of the social aspects of transience that can be found only in communion with each other. We must overcome our collective shyness and the popular but false dichotomy between introversion and extroversion, those opposing vices of the present age preventing us from experiencing the virtuous and transcendent middle territory between them.

In short and in closing, we must become comfortable being alone with ourselves once again, and we must once again become comfortable being with others—for only in the intentional balance between the solitary and the social can transcendence in all its natural and human richness, in danger today of being lost to humanity forever, once again be found, in a human awakening—a reawakening—worthy of Thoreau’s own mornings on Walden Pond.