Literary Tour of New England II: Walden Pond and Concord

lizshine74by lizshine74

In On writing, Travel.

A pond with trees in the background

Cited as an influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi and mentored himself by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau is a household name (whether you’ve read him or not). One truth that pops for me in this reflection after our visit to Concord and Walden Pond is the power of influence. The intertextuality of literature. When you start to weave the connections between works of great writers and their influences, you see a kind of string art around particular themes. Thoreau’s famous Walden begins with the essay “Economy.” It opens thus: “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”

On our way to Walden Pond, we came across a replica of that little house. I’m not sure if they made it true to size. If so, emphasis on the little! It’s the tiniest of tiny houses. But let me back up a little bit to the prior afternoon, when we first went to visit the pond.

We rolled into Concord in hopes of going right to the pond where Thoreau famously walked. He wrote in the mornings while his mind was fresh, then spent afternoons walking and observing nature. (Generating creativity!) He kept a journal, his most prized possession that he kept locked up when out exploring. He meticulously edited his work before publishing, so he might be mortified to know that since his death his journals have been published in their entirety in fourteen volumes and over two million words. Thoreau saw writing primarily as a spiritual act. In 1849, he paid for the printing of Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself. So, if you are thinking about self-publishing (and worried about the credibility of such a move), maybe read an essay or two from Thoreau before you completely toss the idea aside.

I admit I expected a quiet, pristine, secluded lake. Naïve, I guess. We found a pond closed early for the day due to already being at capacity by mid-afternoon. We did see one man with a towel over his shoulder dart across four lanes of state highway and run through the woods to get in. It was a sight I will never forget, seemingly right in the vein of the self-reliance and civil disobedience Thoreau championed. Our plans foiled, we headed into the town of Concord to look around and have dinner. We made a new plan to wake early and take in this Transcendentalist stomping ground before heading off to Cape Cod to spend some days with family.

Walking through downtown, we noticed the stamp of Thoreau everywhere. Chris cringed at a store called something like Thoreauly Perfect. We went on a walk up to Thoreau Street so I could take a picture of the sign, when I spied a sight worthy of a nature essay: a hawk with its kill on the lawn of a stately colonial, the front porch piled with Amazon packages.

I don’t know if it’s a fact, but it seems to me that without Thoreau there might not have been an Annie Dillard (one of my favorite writers). The way we have embraced his close observations of nature as philosophical inquiry, the ubiquity of some of his most famous lines (Simplify! Simplify!) seems to me to have paved a way for an entire genre of creative non-fiction. (Hello, Wendell Berry!)

Speaking of intertextuality, Thoreau drew heavily on Greek and Hindu mythology, in particular the Bhagavad Gita. Whitman and Emerson also reach out toward Arjuna’s epic journey in their works. At seventeen, I’d been making attempts to practice yoga for a couple of years when I first fell in love with Whitman. That was the year I carried a hardbound, gold-trimmed book in my shoulder bag everywhere I went, and could often be found at night, reading poetry and smoking cigarettes with friends at the cemetery. That’s how intertextuality works in our imaginations. We pick up one book that leads to (or refers to) another, repeat this over and over again, as we return books for our own self-inquiry. In this way, the works become a collage in memory and experience.

Our next morning plan worked perfectly. We grabbed coffee and a breakfast sammie at a local bakery, then headed over to the Concord bookshop where I bought some notecards and a map of New England. We made it to Walden Pond and walked for a while on the path around the lake. It was late morning, already warm, and swimmers were making their way into the water. Many of them appeared to be aiming for a lake crossing as evidenced by little flotation devices tied to backs to bolster the swim.

I’m not sure what I’m looking for in this literary tour of New England. I know I’m visiting the homes and museums and gravesites of different writers. I’m curious what I can learn about how they wrote in particular, since that is what I am concerned with here on Make Time: this practice, how we nurture it, how we shift when things get stuck or stale. I’m also a morning writer, who leans on walking and close observation of nature for inspiration. But one of the things that’s starting to arise as a theme for me is the wealth of possibilities and iterations for doing this work.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.