In1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an address called The American Scholar, in which he expressed his strong opinions of just who this American scholar should be. In his address, he encompasses what the scholar’s ideal influences are and what his moral duties as a learned man include. Seven years later, in 1845, Henry David Thoreau undertook a two year experiment of living by himself in a small cabin in the woods by Walden Pond. Here, Thoreau lived the life of Emerson’s American Scholar, presumably without that particular intention in mind, and later wrote a detailed description of his time in the woods in his masterpiece, Walden. Using only these two great authors’ own works as evidence, and measured against each point that Emerson makes in The American Scholar, Thoreau can be used as a perfect and obvious illustration of this model Man Thinking.
Emerson asks us to “consider [the scholar] in reference to the main influences he receives” (515). Among these influences are nature, books, and action, by which the scholar is to have obtained his education and is to continually expand his knowledge of the world around him. In each of these methods, we find that Thoreau is inherently versed; as he expresses his personal opinions, principles, and actions in Walden, he is unwittingly symbolizing everything that Emerson wished to see in his own ideal scholar.
Nature is considered by both Emerson and Thoreau to be the most essential influence that a man can ever have, one that stays with him throughout his entire life because of his relationship to and in nature. As Emerson says, it is “the first in time and the first in importance. . . Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. . . . The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages” (515). Thoreau, too, was completely convinced of the significance of nature in our lives, and of the link that nature provides us to our past and, therefore, to the primal soul of mankind. Speaking of man’s basic need of shelter, Thoreau writes,
We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. . . . It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. (615)
He goes on to lament the fact that most contemporary societies are moving away from their ancestral connection to the wilderness, and that consequently, “We know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think” (615). His ideas in this respect are closely related to Emerson’s thoughts on the scholar’s relationship with nature, and how that relationship is of utmost importance. Thoreau seemed to believe that modern man knows nothing about life in its most essential sense, because he has never truly experienced the life that occurs in nature. He thought that reliance on new technologies and advancements was in fact detrimental to a scholar’s life, which should be spent in pursuit of higher meaning and higher gratification than that allowed by the lifetime of toil required to supply those luxuries: “For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors” (Thoreau 607).
Another significant connection to mankind’s history, and a second influence necessary for the American Scholar’s educational background, is to be found in books. Emerson considers books to contain “the mind of the Past” (516), because the authors of ancient texts transformed the world around them into their own visions and then put these visions into manuscripts, which can be accessed even today as a glimpse into the past. As Emerson himself so beautifully describes the process of an author’s labor, “[The world] came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him shortlived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry” (516). However, he also warns that the reader should not rely solely on books for his opinions on the ways and workings of the universe. The scholar must always be careful to use books only for motivation and to formulate his own views and hypotheses instead of merely reciting others’ which he has read. “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst . . . They are for nothing but to inspire” (Emerson 517).
Thoreau, also considering the impact of books, mourns the fact that the crumbling remains of the great architecture from ancient civilizations are more revered than the works of the brilliant minds that came from the same era. “It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta [sic] than all the ruins of the East!” (630) It is apparent throughout all of Thoreau’s writings that he relies heavily upon his knowledge of the works of significant historic novelists, dramatists, scientists, and theologians. In the true manner of Emerson’s American Scholar, though, these authors’ texts are invariably used only as an introduction for his own views and to exemplify his own ideas.
The final influence that Emerson mentions is that of action. He states that one cannot learn through books alone, and speaks about living life as directly related to understanding it, or even being the inspiration for us to strive for understanding. We cannot write well without having some knowledge of what we write about, and we cannot have that knowledge without experience, and through experience we gain character enough to write well. As Emerson put it so succinctly, “Life is our dictionary” (519). All authors’ best—if not only—work originates from events in their lives, usually ones that affected them greatly and personally, and years of reflection upon those past experiences. Emerson says of the scholar, “Without [action] he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth . . . Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (518); meaning that one cannot truly know that part of life which one has not experienced. Thoreau almost repeats Emerson’s words exactly in his interpretation of the usefulness of action in a student’s life:
I mean that [students] should not play life, or study it merely . . . but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? . . . Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted . . . or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile? (627-628)
Not to be so shallow as to speak such words and hold such views hypocritically, Thoreau undertook to prove this very idea when he lived his own “experiment” at Walden Pond. In building his own home, growing his own food, and sustaining and supporting himself wholly, Thoreau was determined to prove that this was not just a theory by living the lifestyle which he know in his heart to be better. The very fact that he did this epitomizes the ideal behavior an American Scholar should exhibit: “[Living] is a total act. Thinking is a partial act” (Emerson 520).
Emerson went on in his address on the American Scholar to comment on some of what he called the scholar’s “duties.” These are qualities that the scholar should possess and traits that he should exhibit, which will prove to elevate him above the inconsistent character of society. Above and throughout the scholar’s duties is that of self-trust: “It becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and only he knows the world . . . In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended” (Emerson 521). Thoreau did not seem to have a problem with this particular virtue. Some critics have gone so far as to call him arrogant, though the case is more likely that he was simply a brilliant man with an idea that he had supreme faith in and wished to share. In one line he writes, “I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely” (Thoreau 638). This one sentence encapsulates Thoreau’s convictions, his experiment at Walden Pond, and his subsequent writings on the same in a minimally basic yet impeccable manner.
The first duty that Emerson lists as being an essential attribute of the American Scholar is the “slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation” (Emerson 520). Emerson considers it the scholar’s responsibility to “guide men by showing them facts” (520), to give up a life of social interaction and companionship in favor of a life of learning, of examining, of cataloguing the world for the benefit of all humanity. He could easily be describing Thoreau in his cabin at Walden Pond when he says,
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach, and bide his own time—happy enough if he can satisfy himself alone that this day he has seen something truly . . . He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature . . . He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. (Emerson 521)
We can clearly see Thoreau in this passage, patiently and steadfastly cutting timber for his home, leveling the ground for its foundation, carting rocks from the pond for his chimney, clearing a field for planting, harvesting his crops, and baking his bread over an open fire in the rain. Through it all, he was content to observe the natural world around him, and to compare the surrounding environment to that of civilization, which he renounced for over two years. Thoreau was unceasingly fascinated by nature’s wonders: “So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind . . . For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms” (610), and he was appreciative of the close interrelationship between abstract science and tangible nature: “The same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of earths like ours . . . The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! . . . Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions” (606). Observation was a talent that Thoreau not only excelled at, but also thoroughly enjoyed.
Finally, Emerson listed as a duty of the scholar the virtue of being both free and brave. It was his opinion that “fear always springs from ignorance” (521), and therefore the scholar, by his very definition, should never be allowed to show fear or cowardice, as this would betray him as something less than scholarly. Hence, the American Scholar must not run and hide from danger but face it head on and scrutinize it; “Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin . . . he will then find himself a perfect comprehension of its nature . . . and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior” (522). Thoreau, again, obviously felt this same way. He, too, believed that men fear what they do not understand, and that knowledge and understanding are the greatest tools a person can possess. Speaking of the “lives of quiet desperation” (605) that he believed most of society to lead, Thoreau says, “The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease . . . When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis” (606-607). He plainly believed that courage stems from comprehension, furthering Emerson’s supposition that a scholar, given his nature, should necessarily be brave.
Thus, when compared with each of Emerson’s key concepts of the fundamental influences and duties of the American Scholar, Thoreau is the perfect embodiment of these ideals: his influences of nature, books, and action are portrayed again and again throughout Walden, as is his belief in the importance of self-trust, observation, and bravery as the essential duties of an intellectual mind. If Emerson was looking for someone to fill the role that he laid out in The American Scholar, he need have looked no further than his own backyard to find Thoreau, the Man Thinking at Walden Pond.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Harper Single Volume American
Literature. Eds. Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 514-525.
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walden.” The Harper Single Volume American Literature. Eds.
Donald McQuade, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 602-696.
