Thoreau invented my genre. His life became his book and vice versa. By living he learned why to live. He told his story so others might benefit from his experience.
He had plenty of predecessors: none of us is unprecedented. Roman emperors and Christian saints had told their stories to exemplify their creeds and enforce their authority. Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Augustine, and many others were not candid in our current sense. They force their personal histories to fit their moral scheme, admitting no uncertainties or doubt. Their books are tactical. They saw themselves as generals of armies, instruments of a cause.
Rousseau approached his story similarly. His life did not conduce to a creed exactly, but to a movement, to reject the inhibiting certitudes of the Enlightenment and let individuals flourish in their complexity. He, like the military and holy men before him, edits out contradictory disclosures (like dumping his five kids in a Paris orphanage).
Montaigne, who invented the essay, did not presume his conclusion – or lie or omit to make his point. He wrote to pass the time: bored and lonely in his chateau, he amused himself by conversing with himself (and his cat). He found his life and thoughts endlessly entertaining, as he unraveled them: so do we.
The Romantics exposed their bleeding souls in poetry and fiction. Shakespeare, in his introspective plays, the tragedies especially, introduced self-revelation disguised as entertainment, as if, in exposing Hamlet, he were not revealing himself. Wordsworth and Keats personalized their accounts of joys and sorrows, unspooked by the first-person singular.
Thoreau began with a mess on his hands: himself. His beloved brother and soulmate had died – of tetanus – after nicking himself shaving. Thoreau, odd-looking and awkward, maybe gay when that wasn’t conceivable, estranged from his neighbors, and really, really smart, ran away to – as we say now – “find” himself. “I went to the woods,” he wrote, in what may be America’s most famous paragraph, right up there with the Gettysburg Address,
because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
Like many a fledging adolescent who feels a mess, I read those words half a century ago with breathless astonishment. You can do that – really? Explore your way out of confusion to a happy heart just by thinking?! Your life, whatever it is, is enough?!
I’m hardly alone. Thoreau unkenneled a yapping army of self-explorers, dedicated to self-discovery. Equivalent impulses, trust me, need not yield equivalent results.
Curiously, I realize this ancestry only now, half a century later, which is why I’m mentioning it. I envisioned my spiritual journey as heroic, unprecedented, me and old Henry, toughing our way to Hallelujah. Hilarious, no?