Fleeing to the Woods, or, Giving Thoreau His Bite Back

The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.

While sipping my coffee before work the other day, I heard the hourly public radio news roundup, which was comprised of the following stories: George Zimmerman’s lawyers want him released until his trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, Anders Breivik gave a detailed and unrepentant description of massacring children to an Oslo courtroom, two U.S. Marines are being dismissed for lying to investigators about a massacre of 24 civilians in Iraq, and the Syrian government is ignoring a UN brokered ceasefire and continuing its shelling of Homs. That was it. That was the entirety of the news update provided by NPR. Minnesota Public Radio then came on with a local news update, but I was so dazed by the horror of reality, I switched to The Current.

Overwhelmed by the seemingly endless desire humans have for killing each other, this news roundup created a strong impulse in me to flee the city for the woods. Such an impulse is healthy and natural—and for myself it certainly is not unusual. I suffer from it regularly, never more than in springtime. A work week makes this difficult, though, so I settled for thinking about what it means to desire the woods. When one talks about the craving for wilderness, it often gets attached to two different ways of thinking: escapism and Romanticism. Both, in my opinion, are wonderful endeavors, and useful in the light of constant human violence. But I think the longing for nature is different than both.

The desire to flee civilization for the woods isn’t about escapism in the entertainment sense of the word. I do not think an escapist tendency should be rejected—I think we all at times need escape. It’s just something different. We escape to altered worlds to reflect on and learn something about how we live, or to just have the chance to ignore our world altogether. Escapism offers an opportunity to derail the senses, to take a break from our world to experience another, while never really getting free of reality. This is why I read “Lord of the Rings” every 18 months or so.

“Lord of the Rings” is escapism of the first order; it is the perfect environment in which to embrace the warm comfort of fiction. This is not like a trip outside. Fleeing to the woods, rather, is an effort to overindulge in reality, to return to our first and most fundamental reality. I recognize that might sound a bit Thoreauvian, a “get back to the woods” style Americana that feels inspirational but contains little actual meaning, like a self-help book or episode of Dr. Phil that sounds true but actually says nothing. This overs-simplified rendering of “getting outside” leads to the second simplified attachment to the desire for the woods, Romanticism-or at least the altered version of Romanticism that it has become.

The rich romantic history of American Transcendentalism cannot be duly represented in this blog post. Suffice it to say that the 19th century American Transcendentalists shaped the consciousness of the nation we have become, and opened a window to nature that previously did not exist. Emerson and Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman: they and others helped push an identity of simultaneous individualism and interconnectedness, a feat that deserves no small amount of recognition. American nature is imbued with romanticism because of the work from this period. But I fear too often we look back at the romantic writers of our national past and see them in softness and un-seriousness. At least, when I am feeling lazy, I do. I contrast them to, rather than see them as akin to, the darker worlds of Melville or Hawthorne—-trying to make sense of the dark and the light of the world.

Today, I think we have a cast a pedestrian pall over Thoreau’s texts and ideas. Generations of college students have scribbled in the margins of “Walden,” myself included. I read that his sojourn to the woods was “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.” I underlined it and quoted it but ignored what it said. This might be the most recognizable sentence in Walden, and it has become a sentiment attached to American idealism and love of nature: get back to the woods and find yourself. It is the same notion that has made Thoreau the statue by the cabin, neutralized. I wonder if we have stripped Thoreau and his deliberateness from its context, which is squarely in the same world that produces the horror in our news.

Thoreau recognized the horrors around him, and his time at Walden Pond was not escapist. He looked at life like a scientists looks in the microscope: to see the world clearly. And I think he did. Thoreau knew the manner in which Americans survive: “we live meanly, like ants.” It is not a condemnation but an honest admission that the world is a difficult place, and this difficulty exists in civilization and in the wild.

I fear today’s meaning of the word romantic, as opposed to what it meant to the brilliant American minds that produced it, has become bullshit. We have made the work of real investigation into a rose-colored pseudo-inspirational enterprise. It is a clichéd notion of selfishness, of getting back to ourselves, getting out of the city, restoring ourselves in the wild, going West, preserving the wilderness for the restoration of our souls; it is the belief that nature is pure and humans are not because we do not live in the wild. That’s a beautiful sentiment but ultimately needs to be rejected. I arrived at this misconception through the American Transcendentalists, but stuck with them long enough to realize this was only a surface reading. The woods are a dangerous place. A walk in the woods is not a pleasant stroll in the garden. Entering the wild means returning to our roots, literally. It is the place that spawned the species that made the men who continually murder their brothers.

When Thoreau built his cabin or John Muir strapped himself to the top of a redwood in a storm, they were not embodying the trite notion of American Romanticism-that came later as we sought to demystify nature and strip it of its bite. We may have turned Muir and Thoreau into symbols that we can easily disregard as meaningless, but they endeavored to encounter the real world, which is more than, but never separate from, our human violence.

When the news comes of the next horrible tragedy, and the unrelenting campaign ensues to make me aware of every gory detail, I again will long for the American wilderness. Not to escape from reality, and not paint reality in the pastels of harmlesness as I sometimes do. Rather, I will go to find nature, red in tooth and claw, in the real endeavor of our 19th century forebears: “be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger