My goal is to keep all of Walden and clarify only those portions that impede the reader; not to simplify it; not to reimagine it; not to adapt, interpret or modernize it. Instead, I seek to retain Thoreau's words and--most importantly--his voice. I want to preserve the sense he is writing in his time and yet make him readable to us in ours. To succeed, I should have merely cleared the trail Thoreau already blazed through the woods but not have paved over it.
Walden, Amended
Introduction
Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s best known work, is his account of two years spent in a cabin on Walden Pond. Like him it is peripatetic and wanders across many fields, looking at the weeds, wild apples and human condition along the way. I read it once years ago yet remember little more than the popular, well known aphorisms. One hundred seventy years after they were written, their insights have endured as cultural touchstones; we recognize their deep meaning while at the same time relegating them to posters and refrigerator magnets. In the process we have also lost sight of the greater legacy.
​
No doubt Walden is seldom read to the depth it deserves and these days may be seldom read at all. Prose from the mid-19th century is more complex, allusive and prolix than in the 21st century, and the linguistic gap between then and now requires effort to bridge. To see what I had missed the first time, I made the effort to revisit Walden and found significant portions to be nearly intractable—dismaying for a text many consider foundational to the ecological movement. Though Thoreau used antiquated words, classical references and the occasional Latin phrase or quotation, these are sporadic enough to be ignored with little loss. While annotations are valuable for providing context and explanation, they do not address the problem that makes large swaths of Walden difficult to traverse. Thoreau can be excessively rhetorical, even by the conventions of his day, and this excess, which is characteristic of him, discourages contemporary readers. Much of his writing is straightforward, if wordy to us, but much is also opaque with run-on sentences, subjects too widely separated from objects, and ambiguous antecedents. A gem like, “Simplify, simplify” is embedded—ironically—in an overly complicated paragraph about the need to simplify life. Thoreau was many things, among them: writer, naturalist, philosopher, surveyor, pencil maker and handy man. However, he was not an editor.