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00:00Major funding for Henry David Thoreau was provided by the Better Angels Society, Jeff Skoll, the Mansueto Foundation, Tyson Foods,
00:12and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
00:15Funding was also provided by the Tyson Family Foundation, the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation, and by the Better Angels
00:23Society members, the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment and Mark A. Tracy.
00:30Additional funding was provided by Roxanne Quimby Foundation, Jim and Mona Mylan through the HeartSpace Fund, and Elizabeth Kenney.
00:45In the spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau was 27 years old.
00:52For years, he had dreamed of spending time away from society.
00:57So he asked his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, if he could build a small one-room house on
01:05land that Emerson's family owned, not far from the village of Concord, Massachusetts.
01:12Emerson agreed.
01:21I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among
01:30the reeds.
01:31It will be success if I shall have left myself behind.
01:36But my friends ask what I will do when I get there.
01:40Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?
01:46Henry David Thoreau.
01:50Still mourning the loss of his brother, John, who had died three years before, and facing an uncertain future, Henry
01:59was ready to try what he called my own experiment.
02:03For the next two years, he would live in a small cabin at Walden Pond.
02:09There, he could focus on his writing while contemplating the natural world and himself.
02:17He begins a lot with Emerson's ideas about nature and civilization.
02:22He has to try to put them into practice and see how they hold up.
02:27He's not going into the wilderness.
02:29He's not trying to be a hermit.
02:31He wants to position himself on the edge of society to see if he could live there, get by, and
02:39be happy about it.
02:41His stay would be interrupted by an expedition to the wilderness of northern Maine, and by a night in prison
02:48at the local jail, both of which would expand his understanding of freedom.
02:56Writing about his experiences would change the lives of countless others around the world for generations to come.
03:04I have to figure out how to live, but what does that mean?
03:07He really reduces that question to its absolute barest terms, and then proceeds to see what he can learn about
03:17being alive.
03:35July 5th, 1845.
03:39Yesterday, I came here to live.
03:56On July 4th, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a 10-by-15-foot house on the northern shore of
04:05Walden Pond.
04:07He had built most of it himself, cutting down trees to make a post and beam frame, which friends helped
04:15him raise.
04:16He then attached siding from a shanty he had purchased from an Irish railroad worker, hauled up rocks from the
04:23pond for a chimney, and dug a root cellar.
04:27He moved in, bringing along his cane bed, green writing desk, a small table, and three chairs.
04:35One for solitude, he said, two for friendship, and three for society.
04:42Some people called it a lonely hut and a wooden inkstand.
04:49For Henry, it was home.
04:53My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it.
04:58It was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping room.
05:02I enjoyed it all.
05:14July 6th.
05:16July 7th.
05:17I wish to meet the facts of life, the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant
05:26to show us.
05:29Life.
05:30Who knows what it is, what it does.
05:37July 7th.
05:39Tonight, as I sit by my door, I hear the far-off lowing of a cow.
05:46Why should I find anything to welcome me in such a nook as this?
05:54After the evening train has gone by and left the world to silence, and to me, the whippoorwill chants her
06:03vespers for half an hour.
06:06And when all is still at night, the owls take up the strain like mourning women, their ancient Yululu.
06:20On most mornings, Henry got up at dawn to tend to his vegetable garden, including row after row of beans,
06:28an endless task only made harder by the woodchucks that dined on the shoots.
06:35Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with nature
06:44herself.
06:46I got up early and bathed in the pond.
06:49That was a religious exercise.
06:51And one of the best things which I did, renew thyself completely each day.
06:57His morning bath he describes as a religious exercise, not just as some sort of random dunk that he took
07:06in the pond, but as a sort of ritual act that has suddenly a significance beyond itself.
07:15Thoreau also said I needed to clean the house.
07:17So I took all the furniture out, and the furniture was happy to have a little excursion into nature.
07:24He said, I almost regretted having to bring it back in.
07:27He waited until November to plaster his house.
07:31And before that, there were all these cracks where, you know, animals came in, bugs came in, and the air
07:38came in.
07:39And he loved that.
07:41In the afternoon, he often took long walks and made detailed field notes of everything he heard and saw, a
07:51practice he would continue for the rest of his life.
07:57Walking was a writing practice, a process of taking notes that would become the content of his journals as inspiration
08:06would spark to turn it into a kind of larger mythology.
08:10What he observed fed what he would write about, but what he wrote about would also lead him deeper back
08:20into observation.
08:23Thoreau filled page after page of his journal with reflections on nature and the human condition, often referencing Greek and
08:32Roman literature, as well as ancient Eastern texts like the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhist sutras.
08:39He's saying all of these texts and traditions have something to teach me.
08:45Thoreau is taking his own experience and he's elevating it.
08:52The vision of simplicity had been explored in Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism.
08:59But in Concord in 1845, I think it was something radical and liberating.
09:06So whether he knew those works or not, he inwardly rhymed with them.
09:13Thoreau would find a way to incorporate many of these ancient teachings into the project he went there to write.
09:20A book about the trip he took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers with his late brother John.
09:28He strengthened and oriented himself in writing.
09:33Writing was a way of being alive that was deeply nourishing to him.
09:51I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will
10:01live simply and wisely.
10:07Throughout his stay at Walden Pond, Henry kept meticulous track of his finances.
10:13He needed to spend money on seed and other garden expenses.
10:18But he actually made money selling his produce.
10:21It cost him less than $20 to live there for the first six months.
10:27The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged
10:35for it.
10:36His goal is to remind us how much energy it takes, how much work it takes to make a living.
10:45But why are you making a living?
10:47Well, to buy these things.
10:49But why do you need these things?
10:52His focus was on how much do I have to work to secure my sustenance so that I can do
10:58what I really want to do.
11:00Our life is frittered away by detail.
11:04Let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand.
11:12Simplify.
11:13Simplify.
11:14Simplify.
11:17I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,
11:22To front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
11:30And not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
11:40We all get lost in the challenges of everyday life, and our world has been set up to help
11:48you do that.
11:50As I understand it, the root of deliberate is from freedom, and it's to do something
11:57because you choose to, not because fate dictates it.
12:02On some days, he simply chose to do nothing.
12:09There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment
12:14to any work, whether of the head or hands.
12:21Sometimes having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till
12:29noon, wrapped in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs in undisturbed solitude
12:38and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house.
12:47Until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the
12:54distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.
13:02I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of
13:10the hands would have been.
13:13He practiced doing nothing, which can be the hardest thing of all for many of us.
13:18He saw the beauty of sitting still, and he knew that if he just sat by his pond, reflecting
13:24in every sense of that word, he could find everything he needed.
13:28He says that one of his job descriptions is to know the nick of time, to be able to notch
13:33it on his stick.
13:34He wants to be present.
13:36He gets down and on the ground to look at the battle of the black ants and the red ants.
13:43At the pond, he goes into the shallows, and he finds a way to pet fish.
13:49Try that sometime.
13:51You have to surrender to nature and nature's rhythms if you want to be whole, and you will
13:59see things you never saw before, and what you see will mean more than it ever did.
14:09What sweet and tender, the most innocent and divinely encouraging society there is in universal
14:18nature.
14:19There can be no really black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has
14:28still his senses.
14:31While I enjoy the sweet friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life
14:36a burden to me.
14:38Here, I know I am in good company.
14:51In his bean field, as he's honing his beans, he came across these arrowheads and stone implements
14:57of native peoples.
14:59And he gets a sense that people have lived here for thousands of years whose lives are
15:03very much written on the land.
15:06He notices other signs in the landscape.
15:09He saw bricks.
15:11He saw cellar holes.
15:13He saw trees and bushes that are not native to Walden Woods.
15:19This meant someone had been there before.
15:21Who were they?
15:22Where had they gone?
15:23What was their story?
15:26For human society, I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods.
15:33The woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens
15:39and dwellings.
15:40In this 19th century American, New England town, you think of this kind of thriving, very
15:45close-knit community, which Concord really was to a large degree.
15:49And then on the outskirts, there are other people.
15:52And Thoreau was fascinated by these people who were living on the edge, living very close
15:57to the land.
15:59These were people who had been enslaved in his hometown.
16:03In the 1780s, Massachusetts became the first state to make slavery illegal.
16:10But most black people in Concord had to choose between working as servants or scratching out
16:17a living on poor quality land that no white person wanted to farm.
16:23Sentiments don't change just because a law is enacted.
16:27The conditions of enslavement, of labor, those may change in the law.
16:34But in practice, it's really servitude for life.
16:39Using local lore and his own observations, Thoreau pieced together the stories of what
16:46he called these former inhabitants, which otherwise would have been all but lost from
16:52the historic record.
16:53As he's writing a biography of the green space that we know of as Walden Woods or Walden Pond,
17:00he's also writing the biography of a black space.
17:04Down the road lived Brister Freeman, slave of Squire Cummings once.
17:10There, where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and tempted, large old trees now.
17:17We're learning about a man who decided to claim for himself his new status as a free man.
17:24But he couldn't plant a larger crop, something more in line with what other Concord farmers were planting.
17:31Because it's not fertile soil, so he's barely able to make his way.
17:37Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house
17:46where she spun linen for the townsfolk.
17:48He describes the life of Zilpha White, who is eking out an existence.
17:55She spins threads and silks for the conquered women.
17:59She led a hard life, and somewhat inhumane.
18:04One old frequenter of these woods remembers her muttering to herself over her gurgling pot,
18:11Ye're all bones, bones.
18:14And he describes her as living a life that is cruel and witch-like.
18:19This woman in the woods who's overheard stirring a pot and saying,
18:24bones, all ye are are bones.
18:27And later, he comes to a place where he says,
18:30you know what?
18:31She wasn't witch-like.
18:33She's hungry.
18:36East of my bean field, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,
18:41slave of Duncan Ingraham of Concord Village, who gave him permission to live in Walden Woods.
18:47And the man to whom Cato is enslaved says,
18:50you have freedom, but you will receive nothing from me.
18:55So Cato begins to try to make a life for himself.
18:59Cato has tried to secure a future by planting walnut trees,
19:04but he's preparing for a future that he never gets to enjoy.
19:09What remains in the earth is central to African American history.
19:15So planting walnut trees is a way of understanding that they were there.
19:22And also, they have ownership.
19:26Ultimately, it is enslavement that kills him,
19:28because the terms of his freedom are so qualified.
19:34They're so mean-spirited.
19:37And this is the story Henry tells us.
19:41Why did this small village fail, Thoreau asked, while Concord kept its ground?
19:49Thoreau is asking the question at the heart of American history,
19:54at the heart of America itself.
19:57The question of why, after slavery, a community of formerly enslaved people could not be included,
20:06could not make themselves into a town that could survive and blossom.
20:12The gentlemen of Concord abandoned them to their freedom.
20:17He's trying to negotiate how there can be different histories alongside his at Walden,
20:23because he gets to move wherever he wants to,
20:27because he's a person of privilege.
20:29And all of that paves the way towards his increasing involvement in anti-slavery work,
20:35and his outrage about injustice.
20:44The minister of the Congregationalist Church once said,
20:48who but some half-crazy, disgusted hermit would live alone and independent?
20:55So Thoreau's choice is a choice that his neighbors are going to think is really strange.
21:03Why would you live alone?
21:04I think he went to Walden not to escape human society,
21:08but to find a vantage from which to look at it, criticize it.
21:15I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughed so loud,
21:20or the Walden pond itself.
21:22What company has that lonely lake, I pray?
21:27I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture,
21:32or a bean leaf, or the north star, or the south wind, or the April shower,
21:39or the first spider in a new house.
21:43I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than in any other period of my life.
21:49Walden was basically the town's backyard.
21:52It turned out not to be a place of solitude at all,
21:55because he's right by the road.
21:57And this is the town's favorite fishing hole and picnic spot.
22:01He received visitors regularly.
22:04His friend Ellery Channing stayed with him for two weeks, sleeping on the floor.
22:09Bronson Alcott visited weekly.
22:12Others came by just out of curiosity.
22:17People are stopping by, and he wants to tell them what he's doing
22:22and why he's trying to simplify his life.
22:26Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip,
22:31which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth
22:36or from newspaper to newspaper, which, when taken in homeopathic doses,
22:43was really as refreshing as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.
22:50He frequently headed into town to spend time with family and friends,
22:55work at the Thoreau pencil company, and do chores at home.
22:59He also picked up supplies he needed and sometimes dropped off his laundry.
23:05When everyone pretends to hate Henry David Thoreau for exploiting female labor,
23:11they're pretending that the woman and his family were just domestic drudges,
23:16that all they did was cook and wash clothes.
23:20These women were leaders.
23:22They were taking in the dirty laundry of America that is slavery.
23:25So the laundry question is dismissive of all that and all the other ways he was contributing.
23:33He paid rent to the family his whole adult life.
23:37He did a lot of manual labor as well as being a teacher, a nanny, and housekeeper.
23:46After learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news,
23:51what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace,
23:55and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer,
23:59I was let out through the rear avenues and so escaped to the woods again.
24:07He kept himself unencumbered.
24:11No romantic relationships that we really know about.
24:14He didn't have children.
24:16So the ties that bind ordinary people, he was free of a lot of those,
24:23and that was partly the basis of his freedom.
24:26He was one of the town's, in many ways, most social people
24:30because he walked around and talked to people constantly.
24:35Henry was a good friend, but he was a difficult friend sometimes.
24:42He expected so much of friendship.
24:45It's difficult for him to disagree with someone
24:47and still feel like he can go on being friends with you.
24:51One of his friends said of Thoreau that his thoughts burned like a flame in him
24:57because of the earnestness of his convictions.
25:01One of the ways he put ideas into practice is test them against other people's ideas.
25:05So he enjoyed the argument that it helped them refine his ideas.
25:11But he also had a sense of the other beings we share this planet with.
25:16This is a time when nature is either a threat or a resource.
25:20He's finding a whole other way to think about it.
25:23It was a real series of particular relationships with particular species,
25:33kinds of weather, even individual organisms.
25:39He considered the plants and the beans and the moon his friends as well.
25:44And he said, how could he ever be lonely when we're part of the Milky Way?
25:49Not all of us have such an expansive sense of friendship.
25:58One day in the summer of 1846, after a year in his cabin, he went to town to pick up
26:05a mended shoe.
26:08There, he ran into the constable and tax collector, Sam Staples,
26:12who pointed out that Henry owed four years of state poll taxes,
26:17an annual fee that every adult male citizen was required to pay in order to vote.
26:24Sam offered to pay it for him, but Thoreau adamantly refused.
26:31I was seized and put into jail because I did not pay a tax to or recognize the authority of
26:39the state,
26:40which buys and sells men, women and children like cattle at the door of its Senate House.
26:49The economy of Massachusetts had depended on trade with the South,
26:53and they were still constrained by the times that actually permitted enslavement to exist in the first place.
27:02So by paying Massachusetts taxes, he continued to sustain this appalling, immoral, anti-American economic system.
27:12And then there's the Mexican-American War, which is not just a war between two nations.
27:19It's actually an American provocation and campaign to expand enslavement.
27:26It's a territory grab.
27:30Henry David sees this and decides,
27:33well, how is my name actually attached to these enterprises?
27:37Through taxes.
27:38The dollar can now have a different kind of currency.
27:43Henry was placed in an upstairs cell.
27:46He spent the night there, viewing his hometown from the fresh perspective of a prison window.
27:53Seeing more clearly, he said, the state in which I lived.
28:00Someone, probably his aunt Mariah, bailed him out.
28:04He was mad as the devil, Staples remembered, that someone had interfered and paid that tax.
28:12Within 30 minutes of his release, Henry found himself picking berries on Fairhaven Hill, surrounded by children.
28:21I joined a huckleberry party on one of our highest hills, he mused.
28:26And then the state was nowhere to be seen.
28:31The question of how to live a life of conscience is a major question for him.
28:36How do you go on living at a time when simply living your life seems complicit with something you find
28:44morally intolerable?
28:46Just a week after his night in jail, Thoreau invited the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society to host their annual
28:54event at his cabin,
28:56commemorating the end of slavery throughout the British Empire.
29:01From Henry's open doorway, a slate of speakers addressed the small crowd, including William Henry Channing, a Unitarian minister who
29:11called for a new U.S. Constitution that excluded slaveholding.
29:15And Louis Hayden, a rising abolitionist who had escaped from the plantation of the powerful Kentucky senator, Henry Clay.
29:25Hayden told the audience the tragic story of his wife and child being sold away from him.
29:32And Thoreau starts to realize that he had a social and ethical responsibility to speak out.
29:40He needed to give this his time and attention in a deep way as well.
29:46Thoreau began to write in earnest on society's obligation to uphold the principles of freedom and justice.
29:53Culminating in an extensive essay that would be published three years later.
30:00It would eventually be called Civil Disobedience.
30:05Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
30:15It is there that the fugitive slave and the Mexican prisoner on parole and the Indian come to plead the
30:25wrongs of his race should find them.
30:28On that separate but more free and honorable ground where the state places those who are not with her, but
30:39against her.
30:40The only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.
30:49In order to challenge the status quo, in order to recreate a new sort of society, there needs to be
30:56what Thoreau calls counter-friction.
30:58Slavery is a machine that is moving forward constantly.
31:04Friction creates heat and the machine itself breaks down.
31:11The human revolution in a single person can change the course of history.
31:18My Uncle Johnny went to prison.
31:21He encountered a young man by the name of Malcolm Little.
31:24And Uncle Johnny introduced Thoreau to Malcolm.
31:29The only place that a free man can abide with dignity in a slave state is in a jail cell.
31:34That resonated with Malcolm.
31:37That Thoreau would choose, as a matter of honor, a jail cell.
31:43Malcolm Little would later be known as Malcolm X.
31:48During his prison years, he was often found reading the works of Thoreau.
31:57People just don't have brilliant ideas about justice and redemption from an empty blank slate.
32:06Martin Luther King was reading Thoreau.
32:10Civil disobedience, the words of Henry David Thoreau, could be used to disobey laws because they were unjust.
32:17So a person like a king or a Malcolm X found solace in what Thoreau was talking about.
32:25The first time Gandhi was imprisoned, somebody gave him a copy of Thoreau's civil disobedience for him to read.
32:36Thoreau was thinking on the same lines as he was.
32:40That's how Gandhi began his civil disobedience campaign.
32:46You need some adrenaline once in a while.
32:49You need a booster shot.
32:51And his essay provides that even this late in the 21st century.
32:57How do we talk about problems of conscience when you're in the minority and you feel like your country is
33:02moving in the wrong direction?
33:04He said, I feel called upon to right the wrongs of my country.
33:14The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe.
33:19Whether it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets and try their effect
33:27on our humanity.
33:30Their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited.
33:38On August 31st, 1846, Thoreau left Walden Pond to join his cousin, George Thatcher, on an excursion to Katahdin in
33:49Maine, the highest mountain in the state.
33:54He brought along a small notebook and pencil to write about what he discovered there.
34:03He wanted to time travel to see what Massachusetts looked like a few generations before.
34:11And then come back and tell the tale of what he'd seen.
34:15That feels like the exact opposite of what he has at Walden Pond.
34:20It was a frontier that was very nearby.
34:24At the same time, he recognizes that it's not a pristine, untouched wilderness.
34:31You see industry.
34:34Bangor is the lumber capital of the world.
34:36Thoreau describes Bangor in 1846 as this cosmopolitan city right on the edge of wilderness.
34:46He also recognized that he was going through spaces that people had worked, traveled, and lived on for thousands and
34:55thousands of years.
34:57Thirteen miles north of Bangor, Henry stood on deck as their steamship passed a Penobscot reservation on Indian Island.
35:09He watched a native hunter get out of his canoe carrying a bundle of fur skins and an empty keg
35:17of alcohol.
35:19This picture will do to have put before the Indian's history.
35:23That is, the history of his extinction.
35:28I observed some new houses among the weather-stained ones, as if the tribe had still a design upon life.
35:36But generally, they have a very shabby, forlorn, and cheerless look.
35:43The church is the only trim-looking building.
35:47Good Canadian, it may be, but it is poor Indian.
35:52These were once a powerful tribe.
35:55I even thought that a row of wigwams with a dance of pow-wows and a prisoner tortured at the
36:01stake would be more respectable than this.
36:06Oh, they're always saying that, we're the last of this, the last of that.
36:13If you knew what the hell we had to go through, yeah, we'll look woebegone.
36:20This was our homeland.
36:24These are people who have been robbed of their territory and forced to live a very impoverished existence on the
36:30margins of society.
36:31And what Thoreau cannot see is that he's part of this world as well and part of the process that
36:36makes this happen.
36:37Standing there with that postcard view of Indian Island, looking for that noble savage.
36:45He's disappointed all his life.
36:48He's looking for relics.
36:50He's looking for relics and people, too.
36:55Thoreau is not coming to Maine really to engage with Native people at this point.
36:59He's going to find the biggest, wildest mountain he can find and see what's on top and bring that back.
37:08Once they reached the wilderness, they continued under the guidance of two white settlers who knew the terrain well.
37:20On September 5th, 73 miles north of Bangor, they paddled across Quakish Lake.
37:30We had our first but a partial view of Katahdin, its summit veiled in clouds like a dark isthmus in
37:39that quarter, connecting the heavens with the earth.
37:45After three more days of paddling, they arrived at the base of the mountain.
37:51At the summit of Mount Katahdin, it's unpredictable weather up there.
37:57If you're up there, be ready for anything.
38:00You're going to be tested.
38:02While the others set up camp, Henry tried to reach the summit alone, but failed.
38:08The next morning, the party set off together.
38:13Thoreau scrambled upward in earnest, leaving his fellow travelers far behind.
38:21I was deep within the hostile ranks of clouds, and all objects were obscured by them.
38:28The cloud line ever rising and falling with the wind's intensity.
38:33The mist driving ceaselessly between it and me.
38:38It was vast, titanic, and such as man never inhabits.
38:46He's freaked out.
38:48He was scared up there in a way that he had not been scared anywhere before.
38:55Henry never made it to the summit.
38:57He was forced to turn back.
39:00His companions were waiting for him below.
39:03And following a stream, they made their way to a meadow farther down the mountain.
39:10There, Thoreau made an exhilarating discovery.
39:14Far more transcendent than what he had hoped to experience on the summit.
39:21He has this eerie feeling of displacement that really throws him.
39:28He's thinking about the fields in Concord and the field on the side of Mount Katahdin.
39:35These two places together, familiar and strange.
39:39And I'm not even sure he quite understood what had happened to him at the time.
39:43Because it's not until he's down the mountain and really letting it sink in and reflecting on it,
39:50that he actually writes the memorable passage, Contact, Contact.
39:57I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable nature.
40:07Here was no man's garden but the unhancelled globe.
40:12It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever.
40:22I stand in awe of my body.
40:25This matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me.
40:31Talk of mysteries.
40:33Think of our life in nature.
40:36Daily to be shown matter.
40:39To come in contact with it.
40:42Rocks.
40:43Trees.
40:44Wind on our cheeks.
40:46The solid Earth.
40:48The actual world.
40:50The common sense.
40:53Contact.
40:54Contact.
40:56Who are we?
40:58Where are we?
41:01Where are we?
41:02You can see Thoreau finding language failing him.
41:05Who are we?
41:07And where are we?
41:08Aren't questions you want to answer.
41:10There are questions you want to live.
41:14Not till we are lost.
41:16In other words, not till we have lost the world until we begin to find ourselves
41:23and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
41:30the membranes between him and nature are completely dissolved.
41:35That sort of mystical, scary experience, he brings with him.
41:42After two weeks in Maine, Henry arrived home.
41:46As he looked upon the familiar landscape that surrounded him,
41:50he realized what he had experienced at Katahdin could be experienced everywhere.
41:57And it was a feeling of wildness, and his writing starts to bubble
42:03with all the extraordinary observations he's able to make.
42:07Nature is all around us.
42:10It's right in the tree that you have walked by every day of your life,
42:14and then you see something new that you've never seen before.
42:18It blows you away.
42:23It's right in the tree that you've never seen before.
42:23Speaking of autumn leaves, he said,
42:27if this had happened only once, it would have gone down in mythology
42:31as one of those events we read about in Greek myth or whatever.
42:35That suddenly all the leaves turn red and yellow,
42:39and the forest was on fire.
42:42But of course it happens every year, and, you know, we take it for granted.
42:46You know, we did.
42:47This is the wonderful way in which Thoreau sometimes shocks you
42:51into an awareness that you should have had yourself, but you didn't.
43:11He did some of his most brilliant writing in the winter.
43:17It was the time he went to his journal with new inspiration
43:21and a sense of digging in, exploring inner worlds.
43:26And then he'd go out and do things like study ice crystals
43:30and come to great cosmic realizations from the smallest of things
43:34to the largest of things.
43:36He loved cold.
43:41In the winter of 1847, Henry ventured outside not only to take long walks
43:48and ice skate, but to drill hundreds of holes in the ice
43:52to collect data about Walden's temperature and depth,
43:56culminating in a unique map of the pond.
44:00That same winter, a team of Irishmen came from Cambridge
44:05to harvest 10,000 tons of ice to sell for refrigeration.
44:11Henry studied the ice, noting the gradations of color,
44:15its changing texture, and how quickly it melted.
44:19And imagine just how far it could be shipped.
44:23Perhaps the inhabitants of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta
44:27will drink at my well, he wrote,
44:30so that Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
44:36This is a way for him to say,
44:38profound sacredness can be found anywhere
44:41if you commit to seeing it.
44:46March 26th.
44:49Suddenly, an influx of light filled my house.
44:54I looked out the window, and lo,
44:57where yesterday was cold gray ice,
45:00there lay the transparent pond,
45:02already calm and full of hope.
45:06I heard a robin in the distance,
45:08the first I had heard for many a thousand years.
45:13It was no longer the end of a season,
45:16but the beginning.
45:20Spring rain brought new life to the woods and fields
45:23around Thoreau's cabin
45:25and revealed an intriguing phenomenon
45:28that appeared in what he called the deep cut,
45:31a man-made excavation carved into the earth
45:35so that railroad tracks could be laid flat.
45:39When there was just the right amount of water,
45:41it would burst forth on the surface
45:43and start giving miniature rivulets of sand flows.
45:48He could see what looked like leaves of ferns,
45:52the leaves of trees,
45:53that would just be created on the bank.
45:56I'm affected as if, in a peculiar sense,
46:00I stood in the laboratory of the artist
46:03who made the world and me
46:06had come to where he was still at work,
46:09strewing his fresh designs about.
46:13What is man but a mass of thawing clay?
46:18There is nothing inorganic.
46:22He sees life organizing itself through matter,
46:26and he realizes that there is not only no divide
46:30between human and natural,
46:31there's really no divide between organic and inorganic.
46:35So we are in there.
46:37We're like the dirt.
46:38We're like the trees.
46:40We're matter.
46:42We have been created by this world,
46:45and we are of it and part of it.
46:48He's starting to recognize
46:49the interconnection of everything.
46:53Even though we may not all speak the same language,
46:57we ultimately all depend upon the same air,
47:00the same water, the same soil.
47:03So the whole idea of a kinship with nature
47:06puts us in a place where we're responsible.
47:22Why I left the woods,
47:24I do not think that I can tell.
47:28I've often wished myself back.
47:31Perhaps I wanted a change.
47:33There was a little stagnation, it may be.
47:38Perhaps if I lived there much longer,
47:41I might live there forever.
47:44One would think twice before he accepted heaven
47:47on such terms.
47:51On September 6, 1847,
47:54after two years, two months, and two days,
47:58Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond.
48:02He had completed the first draft of a manuscript
48:06about his river trip with John,
48:09and he had also begun drafting a second one
48:11about his experiences at Walden.
48:15Over the next seven years,
48:17he would revise it multiple times,
48:20incorporating ever deeper insights with each draft,
48:24and combining his two years of experiences
48:27into one cycle of seasons.
48:32Walden, or Life in the Woods,
48:34would be released in 1854.
48:38The book would eventually sell millions of copies,
48:43reaching into every corner of the globe.
48:47He's not someone who turned his back
48:49on his society to go live in the woods.
48:53He was writing a critique of the world he was born into.
48:58And he thought that what nature gave us
49:01was a firmer place to stand.
49:05I think there's a sense that if you walk
49:08and travel thoughtfully,
49:09then the land will tell you things
49:12about what it means to be part of this rhythm of life
49:15that feels very different
49:16from the frenetic pace of the village.
49:22I learned this, at least by my experiment.
49:26If one advances confidently
49:28in the direction of his dreams
49:30and endeavors to live the life
49:33which he has imagined,
49:35he will meet with a success
49:36unexpected in common hours.
49:40He will put some things behind,
49:43will pass an invisible boundary.
49:47New, universal, and more liberal laws
49:51will begin to establish themselves
49:53around and within him.
49:57And he will live with the license
50:00of a higher order of beings.
50:04He says you will cross an invisible boundary.
50:07Crossing the invisible boundary
50:09is the experiment that he was in.
50:12Thoreau is trying, I think, to show us
50:15that the divide that we assume is out there
50:18somehow dividing us from the natural world
50:21really doesn't exist.
50:23We must learn to reawaken
50:25and keep ourselves awake
50:29not by mechanical aids
50:31but by an infinite expectation
50:34of the dawn.
50:36To carve and paint
50:38the very atmosphere
50:40and medium through which we look
50:43to affect the quality of the day
50:45that is the highest of arts.
50:50His insistence on practice
50:53it wasn't enough to have an idea.
50:55You had to live it.
50:57If you wanted to reduce Walden
50:59to its essentials
51:00I would say its message is
51:02wake up.
51:04We're sleepwalking through life
51:06a lot of the time.
51:08We have technologies
51:09for the avoidance of what's important.
51:12Look around you.
51:14Pay attention to what matters.
51:16Be conscious.
51:18Be.
51:21He never is asking people
51:23to go put up a shanty by a pond.
51:26He's saying each person is an individual
51:29so his message is
51:32to wake you up to your own life
51:34and then you follow it.
51:38Shortly after leaving Walden
51:41Thoreau wrote to his Harvard class secretary
51:44in response to a survey
51:46marking the 10-year anniversary
51:48of their graduation.
51:51I confess that I have very little
51:53class spirit.
51:55However, I will undertake
51:57at last
51:58to answer your questions
52:00as well as I can.
52:03I am not married.
52:06I am a schoolmaster,
52:08a private tutor,
52:10a surveyor,
52:11a gardener,
52:13a farmer,
52:14a painter,
52:15I mean a house painter,
52:16a carpenter,
52:17a mason,
52:18a day laborer,
52:20a pencil maker,
52:21a writer,
52:22and sometimes a poet.
52:24For the last two years
52:27I have lived in Concord Woods
52:29alone,
52:31something more than a mile
52:32from any neighbor,
52:33in a house built entirely by myself.
52:37I have found a way to live
52:39without what is commonly called
52:41employment or industry,
52:43attractive or otherwise.
52:46Indeed, my steadiest employment,
52:48if such it can be called,
52:50is to keep myself
52:51at the top of my condition
52:54and ready for whatever
52:55may turn up
52:56in heaven
52:57or on earth.
52:59Isn't the whole point
53:00of living an experiment
53:01is to try something out
53:03and if it works,
53:04you can then take it out
53:06into the world?
53:07I think maybe he understood
53:10that the problem
53:11of how to live
53:13was not something
53:14he was going to solve once,
53:16that that was going to be
53:17an ongoing problem
53:19and that he was going to solve it
53:21different ways
53:22on different days
53:23in different experiments
53:25through the rest of his life.
53:27It seemed to me
53:29that I had several more lives
53:31to live
53:32and could not spare
53:34any more time
53:35for that one.
53:39The End
53:41The End
54:34I had several more lives to live.
54:38The point was to take Walden back out into the world.
54:42New pursuits.
54:43Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.
54:47And new discoveries.
54:48To hear this unaltered Indian language, it took me by surprise.
54:53The thing he models for us is a life committed to ongoing investigation.
54:58Rustling leaves, they teach us how to die.
55:00Don't miss the conclusion of Henry David Thoreau.
55:05Scan this QR code with your smart device to watch the whole series and learn more about Henry David Thoreau.
55:14The Henry David Thoreau DVD is available online and in stores.
55:19The series is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
55:25The digital companion soundtrack is also available online.
55:29If you have any questions, please visit our website at www.fans.org.
56:14Major funding for Henry David Thoreau was provided by
56:17The Better Angels Society
56:19Jeff Skoll
56:21The Mansueto Foundation
56:24Tyson Foods
56:26And the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations
56:28Funding was also provided by
56:31The Tyson Family Foundation
56:33The Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation
56:35And by the Better Angels Society members
56:38The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment
56:41And Mark A. Tracy
56:43Additional funding was provided by
56:46Roxanne Quimby Foundation
56:47Jim and Mona Milan through the HeartSpace Fund
56:51And Elizabeth Kenney
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