Success Unexpected
Why you should read Walden
Walden is in the air again. As Americans face the prospect of indefinite solitude in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, some are turning to the man who ran toward not away from solitary existence.
Last year, before the term COVID-19 entered the vernacular, I wrote a new introduction to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden while sitting under the gaze of the Great Sphinx at Giza. I had an unexpected sensation: as incredible a monument as the Sphinx is, and as deeply affected as I was by its antiquity and mystery, I realized that I had a more emotional response about twenty years earlier when I visited the grassy clearing where Thoreau built his one-room cabin in 1845 near the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
I’ll never forget my first visit to Walden. It was a snowy day near Christmas and I arrived at the spot to find that the only original remains were of Thoreau’s hearthstone. I knelt in the snow and cleared away the mounting flurries from the stone. I kissed it — and began to cry. I was so deeply struck that this was the place to which one man came to experience life in its fullness. I later wrote that what was there was a kind of Sphinx of air. When writing that I forgot that Thoreau himself had written: “ If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost.”
