A tale of two cabins.
In search of a meaningful life.
We’d all like to rise above the muck, transcending to a place and existence in which we are better. Enter transcendentalism, centered in Concord, Massachusetts, thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature,” which kicked off a philosophical movement that still inspires people today.
“If you don’t know what transcendentalism is,” said Wren, our delightful young Harvard-sweater-wearing tour guide of Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, “just think of it as early veganism.”
I can’t speak to that idea; transcendentalism is a notoriously difficult-to-define New England religious and literary philosophy that thrived in the mid-1800s onward.
As the nation marched into the Civil War, Emerson assured people that individuals could access God through nature and their inner sense of good. He was joined by Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women), among others. These transcendentalists believed they could discover truth on their own through inner reflection and intuition, though the Bible says otherwise.1
Personal intuition, inner discovery, and experience surpassed religious dogma, logic, or inherited authority. For the transcendentalist, God was an impersonal, vague force present in nature rather than a personal, rational being who cares about and seeks to connect with each individual. As you may have guessed, Transcendentalists did not see a need for a savior; they could do it themselves by transcending through self-realization, appreciating the Bible mostly as a historical text, one among many useful tools.2
To be fair, the self-focus of transcendentalists wasn’t like today’s narcissists, who can’t stop taking photos of themselves and struggle with Main Character Syndrome in which all things are about them, their pleasure, and their renown. Instead, they were concerned with issues such as social justice and abolition. I have to wonder if peering into ourselves reveals not truth but a darkness that is so shameful we have to madly do good works to offset it, a classic salvation by works, essentially, seen in today’s activism and race-based guilt. But regardless, the narcissist who loves himself and the one who hates himself is still a narcissist; they are looking to self for all things.
On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a small cabin on Walden Pond, just outside of Concord. He wanted to strip away anything he deemed non-essential for life. He saw society as people living in “quiet desperation,” sleepwalking through life unaware of what mattered. Like so many before and after him, he felt that he could discover the secret knowledge that would give his life meaning if he could just spend time with self. He wanted to see if transcendentalist philosophy could be put into actual practice.
He grew beans. He observed nature closely and kept detailed notes. He kept careful financial records to see how cheaply and simply one could live. He read books, and he wrote his first book. For two years, he tested himself to see whether he could be self-reliant. His experience there would inspire him to later write Walden: Life In The Woods in 1854.
If you’d like to hear what it sounds like to stand where Thoreau’s cabin was and listen to nature in early June, you can:
Thoreau’s actions are admirable and attractive to an individualistic culture like the United States, and for this reason, Thoreau (and other self-reliant authors) has inspired people to do the same, bucking normal society to test their mettle.3
In 1971, Ted Kaczynski headed to Montana and built a small cabin in a remote area. Ted Kaczynski was a mathematical genius.
Kaczynski wanted to live off-grid and also be self-sufficient, just like Thoreau, with no running water or electricity. Yet Kaczynski did not identify with Thoreau. He admitted to reading Walden when he was younger, but did not admire it much. Thoreau was too moderate, too passive, too literary. Symbolic resistance would not suffice. He saw society as dehumanizing and wanted to escape it and reclaim autonomy as an individual. It was good for a while, but four years into it, as his isolation stretched double what Thoreau had ever done, he saw dozers and development creeping closer to his personal wilderness; he was no longer happy to live autonomously.
He had to fight back.
He wrote his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, boldly stating that current industrial society has been “a disaster for the human race.” People were reduced to cogs, stripped of purpose and freedom by technology. You may feel uncomfortable as you read the manifesto because much of it sounds true and resembles what we often read on Facebook on a casual Tuesday, particularly in the conspiracy sectors.
Eventually, Kaczynski turned violent, earning his Unabomber name, leaving death in his ideological wake. Seemingly reasonable ideas, left to fester in an isolation humans were never created for, lead to unreasonable results (a huge problem with the internet today).
The same apparent path doesn’t lead to the same result. Starting points matter; they determine where you end up. Thoreau wanted to be a better person for society; Kaczynski wanted to get away from society. Whereas Thoreau had done a good job putting a name and finger on the problem, he left society intact and, as we’ll see, still participated in it. That was not enough for Kaczynski, who wanted to destroy the problem society, not just protest or make people think.
Thoreau went to find himself; Kaczynski went to lose himself. They are not the same, but they are remarkably close.
The two cabins are similar, but different.4
Thoreau’s cabin still has the trappings of a comfortable, but simple, life. Kaczynski’s cabin, on the other hand, is almost stripped down to not just the bare necessities, but a removal of anything that might bring human joy or pleasure. One cabin is human, the other is harsh. One gently reins in the industrial horse, the other slaughters it.
The ideals of living more in tune with nature, particularly as our world careens uncontrolled into technology and AI, make Transcendentalism ever more attractive. Emerson and Thoreau’s writing resonates as strongly today as it did then, if not more so. You can see this on social media, where people are lauding a kind of Instagram version of homesteading, and pretty young women in flowing milkmaid cotton dresses are gathering eggs, churning their own butter, and making candles out in a pasture full of flowers, oddly unaware that using technology to sell that lifestyle—and that a lifestyle could even be sold—is a righteous clash.
Can we style a life? Should we waste time styling, when living one is difficult enough?
The appeal is understandable: when life is chaotic, operating under a belief system that allows (and requires) us to rely on ourselves to understand and control it seems simple and manageable. It seems better, more righteous. We will slip the bonds of modern age and gain our autonomy by refusing to buy eggs at the grocery store like the “normies” still do. We are special, we are aware, we are separate.
Getting out into the steady seasonal rhythm of nature has always been a balm to the human soul, the reliability of the seasons a constant in a world in chaos (Genesis 8:22). We’ve all been to a place in life where we needed to “touch grass” and disconnect from the chaos to find some rest and peace in nature.
But ultimately, it’s a trap.
We can’t conflate the need to retreat, take a break, and rest with the long-term solution for how life should be lived. What happens when you go out to find yourself and don’t like what you find?
When I go out into nature, I do not talk to self; I talk to God personally. I do not look inward, but upward. The sound of the wind, different in the pine than in the cottonwood, brings relief but mostly because I celebrate the glory of the Creator who was wise enough to make such beautiful variety. It is the times I live in that cause the distress, so I look to the One outside of time for relief. Nature is a balm because it is quiet and less distracting, and I can talk to God without interruption, not because nature is God. Technology is not anathema to truly connecting to God. Idolatry is. Worship of nature and self is idolatry.
It is possible to connect with the Creator of the Universe out in the woods, or in your office cubicle surrounded by screens. You can connect in the truck or while washing dishes (true story). The moment and place we are in—good or bad—will always be surrounded by the discontent of greener grass if we decide it must be so.
Consider that the Transcendentalists in the 1800s felt their lives were dehumanized and consumed with the unnecessary details of an industrialized life. Funny, no? We would consider the mid-1800s as the time we’d like to go back to for a simpler life, not realizing that those who lived then saw it as too complicated. Nostalgia is just a fog blanket over the past, a lying bastard that makes you forget that you’ve always longed for what was, because hindsight makes us feel god-like in our understanding of reality (Ecclesiastes 7:10).
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau wrote in his 1854 book Walden, suggesting there was some fear that, at death’s door, his life would have counted for nothing, barely a real life at all.
When transcendental good works replace faith in Christ, you will have this fear.
A life that cannot be lived anywhere or at any time in any situation is not a truthful life. God infuses who we are, where we are, and when we are with great potential; He is willing to help us walk through it. As mom often said, “Bloom where you are planted.”
If you’d like to hear what it sounds like on the walking path I frequent, not in isolation but here in town, listen and compare to Walden Pond:
Because God is personal and cares about the individual, we are never cogs in a wheel. We always, by our very existence, have purpose and meaning, whether we feel like it or not.
Life is to be lived when and where it comes into existence; it is a seed always capable of doing just that. Changing the geography or pretending you live in a different time period or different circumstances with the hope that it solves some kind of problem, neglects the reality that wherever you go, there you (and your problems) are.
Years ago, after reading about Chris McCandless in John Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild, I was struck by how much effect Thoreau, and others like him, such as Jack London, had on McCandless. Rugged individualism is wonderful until you find yourself alone in the wilderness with a broken leg and a wolf nearby, or lost in the fog of yourself, writing manifestos and sending out actual bombs or ideas that explode into lives and leave the Chris McCandlesses of the world dead. Heroic individualism makes for great books and films, but individuals are easily broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12).
McCandless realized this too late. Toward the final days of his life, he wrote, “Happiness only real when shared.”
Thoreau knew this, despite all appearances of individualism.
His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, owned the fourteen acres Thoreau lived on near Walden Pond; Thoreau did not need to worry about such things as property ownership. Thoreau would frequently walk several miles into town to visit with his friends, and even ride the train to Boston and Cambridge.
He was not an island at all, and he knew it all along. His goal was to put distance between himself and the bustle and distraction of life, to get outside society yet near enough to observe it more clearly. This is a fine point lost on many who followed him, who missed the value he placed on maintaining community connections and saw only a man alone in a small cabin in the woods rejecting modern life.
Thoreau concluded his experiment in his writing, pointing out that most people overcomplicate their lives and lose themselves in the process (“simplify, simplify”). He determined that simplicity and looking inwardly helped restore freedom. Moral responsibility must be central.5 But most importantly, he made clear that the way he lived wasn’t intended to be a blueprint, but instead, everyone should find their version of Walden.
Thoreau’s Walden is gone.
Walden Pond, a small but surprisingly deep lake, now has a parking lot, a manicured beach, and a brand-new building for all the people who flock here to swim, snack, and make noise.
That’s the problem with putting our hope and salvation in a place or time in which we think we can discover ourselves. The place changes, time passes, and we are at the mercy of all of it, having built our house on the sandy beach at Walden Pond.
There is nothing new under the sun; people are always seeking Truth anywhere but in Jesus. Humans are sure they can explain a reason for everything given enough time, and Transcendentalists were no different. In contrast, Christians believe that truth is only revealed through God’s Word and Jesus Christ. Some transcendentalists claimed to be Christians; only God knows. Thoreau dipped his toes in all kinds of religious texts without qualms, and you’ll see it in his writing. However, the Bible is clear we are not to rely on our own understanding of the world and self (Proverbs 3:5) because our hearts are not good but deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9), and that the word of God is truth (John 17:17). Relying on our own understanding and intuition means we’ll be led astray (Isaiah 53:6), as you can see often happens when someone pulls a Thoreau and goes off by himself to find himself as if he is an island to be self-discovered.
Can you discover meaning and truth inside your dark heart? Is self who you look to for the discovery of truth and meaning? In my own life, I’ve found that too much inward dwelling and overanalyzing of self is the path to mental darkness and confusion; it is the overcorrection for being completely unaware of self, and instead focusing on discovering self on my own in an ever-narrowing, dank, receding spiral. This is why, to have JOY, self comes last.
Christopher McCandless, Ted Kaczynski, Noah John Rondeau, Diana and Michael Lorence, etc.
The way we live and how we create and keep our surroundings reflect what’s going on inside; this has always both surprised and goaded me. The minimalist movement to remove clutter to gain peace of mind has a semblance of truth, but it is misguided. Cleaning up around us in the hopes of cleaning up our minds and emotions is the cart before the horse.
I will be writing about his Civil Disobedience later, because it had a similar impact on McCandless, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and MLK Jr., among others.