"The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travelers… are nothing compared with my adventures in this one district." He anatomizes the pictures on the walls, his furniture, his bed: "A bed sees us born and sees us die. It is the ever changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulcher."
Kamo-no-ChŌmei: Recluse in a Remote and Tiny Hut
THE TEN FOOT Square Hut, a brief account of the withdrawal of a man from public life to a tiny hut, where he ended his days, is often compared with Thoreau's Walden. The work is attributed to Kamo-no-Chōmei, a twelfth-century Japanese aristocrat who, disappointed at being passed over for the post of warden of the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto, simply retreated, rusticating himself to the mountains, living alone, "a friend of the moon and the wind."
He was in his fifties when he forsook the world, first for a hut near Mount Hiei, and after five years he moved into greater seclusion in Hino, near Tokyo, for a hut that was hardly ten feet square and seven feet high. Like Thoreau, he describes his simple furnishings (baskets, a brazier, his straw mat, his desk). It is the ultimate in simplicity. Altogether he was a recluse for eight years, and his writing shows the effects of his retreat and renunciation and his nonattachment, achieving a Buddhist ideal. Calmly, he lists the catastrophes of all sorts — acts of God, acts of man — that have befallen Japan. And he sums up his existence in the tiny hut: "Since I forsook the world and broke off all its ties, I have felt neither fear nor resentment. I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die. Like a drifting cloud I rely on none and have no attachments. My only luxury is a sound sleep and all I look forward to is the beauty of the changing seasons."
Thoreau: Home Is the Heavenly Way
HENRY DAVID THOREAU was so emotionally attached to his home in Concord that he found it almost impossible to leave. In fact, after 1837 he did so only for short periods — thirteen days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, some visits to Cape Cod, three trips to the Maine woods, brief spells in Staten Island and Minnesota. He was never alone on these excursions; he always went with a friend or relative. Although he philosophized constantly about travel (he was widely read in the travel books of his time), he is a much better example of someone who really didn't go anywhere. The Maine trip was a team effort, and Thoreau was a follower. A Yankee in Canada is about a one-week train trip with several hundred tourists, what we would call a package tour today. He made no bones about not being a traveler. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: "Live at home like a traveler." Homesick on Staten Island, he wrote, "My thoughts revert to those dear hills… Others may say, 'Are there not the cities of Asia?' But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way" (letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Travel in your head, Thoreau preached in Walden: "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought." He went on to say that it is "easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals… than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone."
A frequent hyperbolic flourish in a Thoreau book or essay is his comparing an aspect of his neighborhood with an exotic place. And these deflations are often paradoxes. Why leave Concord when, as he wrote in a poem,
Our village shows a rural Venice,
Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;
As lovely as the Bay of Naples
Yon placid cove amid the maples;
And in my neighbor's field of corn
I recognize the Golden Horn.
In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, "I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me — that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily — and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more — What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? — The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition."
Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries traveled around the globe — Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific — Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.
Thoreau's three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville's greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of "Ktaadn." Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.
Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home
"TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel," Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.
Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? "Neurasthenic"? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveler — Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.
Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet — almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.
Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader — of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau's Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, "She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something — whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire — provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted."