Romantic predecessors like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, centuries before that, polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci thrived on the interplay between subjective and objective exploration of the world. The journal illustrates his almost daily balancing act between recording scrupulous observations of nature and expressing sheer joy at the beauty of it all. Its continuing relevance lies in the vivid spectacle of a man wrestling with tensions that still confound us. Thoreau’s real masterpiece is not Walden but the 2-million-word journal that he kept until six months before he died. For Thoreau, a sense of wonder-of awe and oneness with nature-was essential. Especially pertinent two centuries after his birth, in an era haunted by inaction on climate change, he worried over a problem that felt personal but was also spiritual and political: how to be a rigorous scientist and a poet, imaginatively connected to the vast web of natural life. Thoreau was staking out a new purpose: to create a continuous, meticulous documentary record of his forays. In the evening, he often transferred the notes from his walks into his journal, and for the rest of his life, he created long entries on the natural world in and around Concord. Mornings and evenings were now dedicated to serious study, including reading scientific books such as those by the German explorer and visionary thinker Alexander von Humboldt, whose Cosmos (the first volume was published in 1845) had become an international best seller.Īs important, Thoreau began to use his own observations in a new way, intensifying and expanding the journal writing that he’d undertaken shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1837, apparently at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s suggestion.

In the afternoons, he went on long walks, equipped with an array of instruments: his hat for specimen-collecting, a heavy book to press plants, a spyglass to watch birds, his walking stick to take measurements, and small scraps of paper for jotting down notes. What the 32-year-old Thoreau quietly did in the fall of 1849 was to set up a new and systematic daily regimen. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.

Henry thoreau walden