Title: Walden
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Editor: Walter Harding
Year 1995
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Price: $30.00 US
Review by: Mike Agger
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Throughout its history, "Walden" has been read in many different ways (natural history, escape literature), but more recently it has been fashioned as self-help, a book which will recenter your soul around the American icon of wilderness. Yet, when we open "Walden" with expectations of grandeur, we find the prose a bit musty and dated, and the sound bites we expect to read ("The great mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation") are buried within a more complex story. "Walden" makes you work to get at its meaning. If, like me, you never made it through "Economy," yet still desire to understand this American classic, I urge you to look at the annotated edition of "Walden" recently published by Houghton Mifflin and edited by Walter Harding.With copious footnotes, Harding brings alive the context of both Thoreau's thought and society. We see Thoreau's deep schooling in the Bible and the Greeks, as well as Eastern philosophy, nautical terms, and Indian lore. Details like "Thoreau loved travel books and read them all his life," and the inclusion of Thoreau's personal annotations to "Walden" make him seem less an icon than an individual. Harding's footnotes also reveal the contradictions inherent in "Walden." We learn that Thoreau lived alone in the woods, but he also had frequent visitors and he often went into town to have his laundry done. Thoreau also liked to cast himself as an innocent, but Harding points out where "Walden" becomes a deeply self-dramatizing and self-advertising book. The beautiful layout of the this annotated edition (sketches and notes from Thoreau's journal are included throughout) and the quality of the research invite the reader to read slowly and to ingest the richness and complexity of Thoreau's thought. The careful reader will discover that Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond transcends wilderness and individuality to stand as a portrait of man and society that will last for the ages.
Walden: If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seabord, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed.Annotation: "The drill-barrow or seed-drill, a device that sows seeds evenly, was invented only four years before Thoreau went to Walden and would not have been widely known in Concord. This is another indication of how well Thoreau kept up with his times -- remarkable for someone who supposedly fled from civilization."
Walter Harding's annotated edition of Thoreau's "Walden" is a thorough re-working of this classic. First-time readers and Thoreau scholars will all find something to delight in, whether it be the illustrations from Thoreau's journal or Harding's careful scholarship. "Walden" can be enjoyed on many levels, and its central message of self-reliance remains undiluted. Read it sometime soon.
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