At Home in Nature

“A little band of dedicated Thoreauvians,” E. B. White once remarked, “would be a sorry sight indeed.” Thoreau is an unusual figure because even his admirers find him an uncomfortable presence—a regular hairshirt of a man, White dubbed him. Thoreau is that pang in your conscience reminding you that your barn, or house, or car is far bigger than it needs to be. Yet readers of Walden often close the book wondering what, if anything, Thoreau would have us do. Are we to emulate his trek into the woods? He clearly discourages conformity. And if somehow we all followed his lead, what would become of community? Perhaps it is enough to heed, in a more tempered way, the Thoreauvian mantra, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Then again, Walden may not be a how-to manual at all, not even an “environmental” text, but simply one man's chronicle of a journey inward, a quest for purity, authenticity, and self-cultivation that involved nature tangentially. In At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America, Rebecca Kneale Gould offers a fascinating account of the tensions and anxieties, as well as the profound satisfactions, that modern Thoreauvians in the “Back to the Land” movement are heir to.

Aesthetics · Art · Conscience · Epistemology · Mantra · Political science · Simplicity · Theology · White (mutation) · American Environmental and Regional History · American Literature and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy · Thoreau and American Literature