Comfort Reading

Like comfort food, we could all use some comfort reading in these dark days of COVID-19.

The stress from the pandemic puts us into flight or fight mode which disrupts our attention span, our memory mechanism, breathing and sleep patterns.  The cost of all this could include our mental health.  Mental health care professionals call it “collective trauma.”  So we all could use some down time and some comfort reading these days.

New York Times reporter Holland Carter wrote a beautiful article in a recent edition about Henry David Thoreau’s time—nearly two years—spent at Walden Pond where he worked on his journals and his philosophical masterpiece, Walden.  “By all measures,” Carter writes, “Thoreau was a failure.  He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and rarely ventured outside its boundaries.  He was a “marginal figure, standoffish, politically radical, a loner, a crank.”  He lived only 44 years.  Very little remains of his time at Walden Pond except a cairn of stones where once stood his shack.  He is buried elsewhere.

Thoreau is the father of “constructive solitude,” Carter writes.  He was doing what we are doing now centuries ago.  Yet, he was not alone in this solitude as we are not alone in ours.  He went into Concord several times a week.  He also had guests that came to visit him and he spoke often to the Irish laborers building a railroad nearby.

But Carter points out that social isolation came easily to Thoreau.  He was irritable and sensitive.  In his eyes, human beings were the problem.  He called his cabin in the woods a retreat from “the noise of my contemporaries.”  Carter believes the cabin was a safe haven from “incipient anxiety and despondency.”

Thoreau’s work falls across many genres:  field research, philosophy and autobiography.  His first book was a tribute to his brother, John, who died at 27 after he nicked himself while shaving and contracted tetanus.

His time at Walden Pond was devoted to self-education—undistracted reading across the disciplines.  He studied nature—“a communicating consciousness,” he called it.  No ego-driven clamor allowed.  Reading and writing are the prime tools for this, but also the eye.  In the days before photography became less cumbersome and time consuming, Thoreau wanted to be the “transparent eyeball” his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson described, someone who allowed the world of nature and humanity to flow through him and to which he would bear witness.

That cairn of stones?  They were gathered by past pilgrims who have journeyed to the sacred place where the philosopher walked and lived and wrote.  “It is a monument designed by no one, built by everyone,” says Carter.  People come together to see a place that for one man, meant solitude and isolation, a chance to think and dream of a better world more open to experience and self-reliance.

In this time of the plague, it might bring comfort to read or reread Walden.  Spring is in full form, summer is yet to come, and who knows where we will all be in September.  The earth turns and we grow older, but what a place of beauty is this landscape even with all its suffering.  There, too, is joy if we learn to absorb and appreciate it.  There is great, immense beauty.  Thoreau reminds us of what an awesome thing it is to be alive.  And that is pure comfort when we need it most.