with Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson, and Daisaku Ikeda
From Conversation Four:
"Refusing 'All the Accustomed Paths'”
Concord, Hometown of Thoreau
IKEDA: Thoreau spent almost his entire life in Concord. The name Concord refers to the peaceful negotiations through which the colonists obtained the land from the indigenous people. Of the river flowing through town, Thoreau wrote, “It will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks.” (1) Concord was then a prosperous country town with a population of less than two thousand, mostly farmers. But idealistic intellectuals like Emerson lived there, too, creating a cultural ambience more stimulating than anywhere else in America.
The enthusiasm with which Thoreau described his life as the
pursuit of “homely every-day phenomena and adventures” is genuine,
as is the sense of joy with which he expressed his belief that
he was “born into the most estimable place in all the world, and
in the very nick of time.”
IKEDA: When Thoreau was born in 1817, the Revolutionary War was a thing of the past, the Civil War yet to come. His youth was spent in a happy place at a happy time.
BOSCO: His biographers have always found it difficult to name
him or define his character through conventional pronouncements
such as “Thoreau was a. . . .” Over the course of his forty-four
years, Thoreau was variously a teacher and tutor; a lecturer on the
IKEDA: Again, it is wrong to reduce any human being—especially
a versatile one like Thoreau—to a single characteristic. In many
ways, Thoreau’s life itself is even more appealing than his written
He reminds me of Gandhi, who, when asked what his message was, replied, “My life is my message.” (3) Had Thoreau been asked a similar question in his later years, he probably would have had the same response. His entire life was one wonderful literary work.
More Than One Life To Lead
BOSCO: Thoreau’s most straightforward explanation for his life
and character comes at the conclusion of Walden, where he explains
his reason for leaving the pond. Believing he had more than
one life to lead, he felt he could spare no more time on that one.
IKEDA: Tracing Thoreau’s life, one finds new challenges, new discoveries,
and new progress at each stage. As Emerson said in his eulogy
for his friend, Thoreau refused “all the accustomed paths.” (4)
And in Walden, he alluded to the Confucian classic Daxue, advising
that one should renew oneself daily and completely, and go
on doing so over and over, never losing enthusiasm. (5) Thoreau’s
writings are a guide to his struggle to live in the exceptional way
IKEDA: These are his only works published during his lifetime.
MYERSON: The Maine Woods, published in 1864, two years after
his death, recounts his three expeditions to the Maine wilderness
between 1838 and 1857. Cape Cod, published in 1865, describes
his four walking tours across that prized New England landscape
between 1849 and 1857.
BOSCO: The fourteen volumes of his journal, which Thoreau began
in 1837 at the suggestion of Emerson, preserve the spontaneity,
originality, and depth of his observations of and reflections
on all that he saw and felt during the twenty-five-year span these
IKEDA: In the following lovely verse, Thoreau expressed his eagerness to plumb all life’s possibilities: “My life has been the poem I would have writ / But I could not both live and utter it.” (6) All of his philosophy is revealed in his journal, which provided the basis for his essays and lectures.
A Prophetic Voice
BOSCO: A host of essays, many of them drawn from lectures but
published only after his death, establish Thoreau as America’s premier
patriot and social critic, her earliest prophet of the advantages
of a life lived wholly in concert with nature, and her most influential
Although all his writing is compelling, he is especially brilliant
on nature, combining scientific and spiritual observations, high
literary and ethical standards, and—most inspiring of all—his love
for the natural world and respect for life.
MYERSON: For their blending of science with acute observation,“The Succession of Forest Trees” (1860) and the lyrical “Autumnal
Tints” (1862) are two noteworthy examples of his natural-history
IKEDA: He also wrote sharp criticisms on societal contradictions. We find in his works expressions of anger against human arrogance, social evils, and injustice.
In these three works, he developed some of his most passionate
and sustained arguments against capitalism; the inhumanity of the
institution of slavery; the perfidy of governments that suppress individual
conscience; and the shame of those who, knowing better,
fail to heed the dictates of individual conscience.
IKEDA: In “Slavery in Massachusetts,” for example, Thoreau
Thoreau, a man to whom contradictions in society were perfectly
clear and deserving of criticism, looked down upon political
authority from a spiritual height.
BOSCO: Walden is unquestionably Thoreau’s masterpiece, but had
he written no more during his life, “Civil Disobedience” (1849) and“Walking” (1862) would have guaranteed his reputation throughout
the ages. “Civil Disobedience” has directly inspired such momentous
Thoreau First Encounters Emerson
IKEDA: Thoreau’s works inspire in us the will to live. Beyond being
classics, they can inspire today’s youth with the courage of
this nineteenth-century American idealist. I hope that, inspired by
the great lessons of his life, large numbers of twenty-first-century
After graduating from the Concord Academy at sixteen, Thoreau entered Harvard College. Disliking the emphasis on rote memorization, he spent his time in the library reading on his own. Preferring self-study, he seems to have assimilated naturally the principles Emerson propounds in “Self-Reliance.”
Great people are living models of the possibilities inherent in
human life. Association with them stimulates the desire to emulate
them and the confidence that you can. A great soul is the greatest
inspiration. Such encounters help us develop more than a thousand
BOSCO: Since the nineteenth century, scholars have been fascinated
by and debated the nature of the relationship between
Emerson and Thoreau. Surely, it began as a mentor-student relationship.
In the late 1830s, just as Thoreau was completing his studies at Harvard, he not only read Emerson’s Nature but also came into close personal contact with this great man. From my viewpoint, that Thoreau developed a close relationship with Emerson makes perfect sense and in no way detracts from the originality of Thoreau’s ideas and writing.
BOSCO: Emerson was, after all, Thoreau’s elder; he was an extraordinarily well-read and even world-traveled man by the time Thoreau met him. He was the “idea man” for Thoreau’s generation; and certainly in the early years of their relationship, Emerson piqued Thoreau’s intellect and imagination with ideas and theories that the youthful Thoreau tried to put into practice, like following Emerson’s practice of keeping a journal.
IKEDA: While he was acting on Emerson’s ideas and theories,
Thoreau developed and deepened his own thought. Ultimately,
he became a soaring philosopher in his own right.
MYERSON: The concept of a mentor-disciple relationship as regards
Emerson and Thoreau is a complicated one. Surely, in the
beginning, Thoreau would have responded to Emerson as a mentor,
but I think Thoreau would have defined disciple as a person
IKEDA: In “The American Scholar,” Emerson said that ideas without
action can never become truths bearing mature fruit. Thoreau
was better at applying ideas.
His learning from Emerson stimulated enough growth in his own
philosophy to startle Emerson. Perhaps this was only natural.
BOSCO: The mentor-disciple relationship that started in the late
1830s grew into deep friendship in the 1840s. Here I think we must
distinguish between mentorship—if you will—and friendship.
IKEDA: The relationship grew into one in which the two men
learned together. In 1841, when Emerson invited Thoreau to join
him in dialogue aimed at growing wiser together, Thoreau moved
into the Emerson house, where he took on various domestic
In a letter to his friend Thomas Carlyle, Emerson described Thoreau as a “noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions.” (8) He had great respect for Thoreau, whose development delighted him.
In his essay on “Experience,” Emerson provided us with an
important clue as to how that mentor-disciple relationship could
easily have ended and been replaced by friendship. Emerson wrote
that the world outside his study window—the everyday world of
real men and real women—is not the world “I think.” This is Emerson’s
confession of his personal disposition toward theory in preference
Thoreau, on the other hand, seems to have made a concerted
effort to erase any distinction between the world he thought and
the world he enjoyed in the natural environment in and around
IKEDA: For Emerson, nature was abstract; for Thoreau, it was concrete—
to be seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, and touched
with the hands. In his journal, Emerson praised Thoreau’s use of
brilliant images to explain ideas that could have become tedious.
BOSCO: It was not that, having become friends, Emerson and Thoreau had nothing left to learn from each other. The nature of their relationship had undergone a dramatic and fundamental change.
BOSCO: Thoreau had become his own man and, even by Emerson’s
admission later in life, had much to teach his former mentor. In his
lecture “Country Life,” which he first delivered in Boston in 1858,
Emerson, without naming him, revealed his reliance upon Thoreau
1. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985),
2. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906), 9:160.
3. Mahatma: Life of Gandhi 1869–1948, video by Vithalbhai Jhaveri (The Gandhi National Memorial Fund in cooperation with the Films Division of the Government of India, 1968), Reel 31.
4. Emerson, “Thoreau,” in Essays and Poems, eds. Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America College Editions, 1983), p. 1009.
5. Thoreau, Walden, in A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, p. 393.
6. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 552.
7. Ibid., p. 338.
8. Emerson to Carlyle, May 30, 1841, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, p. 300.
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Walks,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. XII (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903–04), p. 176.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poetry and the Imagination,” in vol. VIII—Letters and Social Aims, at “The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” <http://www.rwe.org/>.
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