Teaching Walden in West Virginia

27 January 2017: "I get it. That's what I left my home to get away from." --a student in my ENGL 204 class today, when talking about a passage in Walden which sometimes stumps first-time readers.

Thoreau writes, "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in." After I share that passage with them, I ask my students, "What's so bad about inheriting land?" For lots of people, especially Americans, the idea that inheriting land can be a bad thing initially sound strange. And in this class we've already talked about the important role land ownership takes in early articulations of the messy, malleable, powerful, and lasting idea of the "American Dream."

Of course, it's not really (entirely) about the farm. It's about the lack of choice or deliberation or active embrace of agency. It's about just walking into the life someone else set out for you--that's what Thoreau is pushing back against. It's about imagining you can do something different. As he puts it in one of his most uplifting sentences, "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor." You can make your life different and better. (And no, "better" doesn't mean wealthier...)

That pushing back that Thoreau's doing is so important and I love love love it. It's a key part of his call for us to wake up and live with purpose and meaning and intention.

So my student's response--the one included above--excited me because, hey, he got it! But more than that, it excited me because it reminded me how what Thoreau outlines here can be so hard to live out, especially for people like some of my students, students from places where very few people break free, break out, or break away. People who, in order to live the lives they have imagined for themselves, have to make painful choice--leaving places that seem safe, leaving the people they know, and in lots of cases being seen as traitors--for wanting to do something different. It's so useful for me to remember this and to let that mindfulness cast light back on my reading of Walden.

I often find myself saying, "Easy said than done, Thoreau" when I read Walden, even though I know he's right about just about everything. But I think some of that acknowledgement of how hard it can be gets a bit muffled when I talk to these students about the text. The young man in my class today reminded me of the value of speaking as plainly and honestly as possible about what Thoreau's up to.