Thoreau is thrown at most students in the US like a hail-Mary pass at the end of a football game: a chapter from Walden, maybe a passage from Civil Disobedience. Nobody expects it to be caught, but if it is—oh, the sense of exaltation. Cheers from the sideline.

Anyone who is culturally literate, at least in E. D. Hirsch’s sense of the term, should know where Henry David Thoreau lived and what he lived for. They probably should be able to quote one sentence of his, or at least recognize it when it is quoted by someone else: “I went to the woods because I wished 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.” Maybe a few other familiar quotations, too: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.” “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” A respectable library should always have a nice edition of Walden, maybe from Franklin Library or Easton or Heritage Press. Like the Holy Scriptures. A nice enough edition that it should always be kept pristine.

The question is not how to read Thoreau or which of Thoreau’s works to read first; the question is whether to read Thoreau at all. Probably you should read his work only if you like to read, to linger over sentences and images and memories and allusions and interruptions on the page; only if you like to read slowly, stopping every so often to think about what you just read, to reflect upon what it meant to Thoreau and what it might mean to you; only if you love the outdoors and spend time outdoors and like to observe nature closely and recall what you see and hear; only if you are willing to see the Infinite reflected in the finite, the timeless within a moment of time, inner meaning in observable outer reality. Only if reading is a form of meandering. Not if you’re racing to see who can make it to the finish line first, or who can walk the farthest, or carry the heaviest load, or collect the most artifacts along the way. Readers will probably like Thoreau only if they’re willing to just poke along, paying attention to curious little details, enjoying a breath of fresh air.

Thoreau probably tells us how to read his works in his essay on walking. Just substitute the word "reading" for "walking" in this passage:

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going â la Sainte Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terre,' a Saunterer,—a Holy Lander. They who never go the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean."

Good readers must saunter, especially readers of Henry David Thoreau.

That’s the reason I don’t think you should begin reading Thoreau with Walden, and especially not with that weighty chapter, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” taken out of context. Maybe A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (q.v.), or selected days from his personal journals. But I particularly recommend “Walking.” To get in the habit of pacing yourself, of sauntering, of stopping often to look around you or to daydream a bit or maybe jot down your own thoughts, one edition works particularly well: Walking: An abridgement of the essay (Berkeley, California: The Nature Company, c1993). The passages on each page are brief with lots of white space, and on every second or third page a beautiful full-color, full-page photograph of a country landscape or occasionally a close-up of nature. Most of the photographs (by John Wawrzonek) seem to capture autumnal scenes, and somehow that seems appropriate, as if autumn were the most thoughtful time of year, a time for slowing down and reaping some good things to last through a long winter. You can’t read this edition without pausing often to soak in the serenity, to let your mind wander—to meander. In fact, if you’re like me, soon you will find yourself marking your place and laying the book aside in order to get out under the trees and the sky, to feel your feet on the ground and the wind in your face.

“Walking” is an essay in which Thoreau wishes to speak a word for nature, especially for the appreciation and preservation of wildness: “. . . in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and the wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.”

Even in his own era, Thoreau worried that the wild was disappearing—being undermined, corrupted, forsaken. “Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forests and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.” What would he think as we enter our 21st century?

“To preserve wild animals,” he writes, “implies generally the creation of forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man.” Without the wildness of forest and swamp and prairies, human writers and philosophers would lose touch with the soil that fertilizes their thinking and their art.

It is when Thoreau comes to discuss wildness in literature that he tells us how his work should be read: “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Iliad,’ in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought . . . . A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.”

Read Thoreau only if you like wild flowers in the woods more than hot-house bouquets, if you see better by sunlight than by candlelight, and if you don’t mind a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder every now and then. If you're willing to entertain a “mallard thought” or two on just about every page.

One of his mottos in “Walking” is

Ambulator nascitur, non fit.

Walkers are born, not made.

The same might be said of readers. A student once asked, “Is it worth my time to read Thoreau?” The real question to me was whether she was worthy to read Thoreau.

[By the way, there is a companion volume featuring excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden. It features the same fine binding, the same elegant format, the kind of beautiful photographs by John Wawrzonek. It is The Illuminated Walden: In the Footsteps of Thoreau, Friedman/Fairfax, c2002. These two oversize books, whether displayed in your library or on your coffee table, will tempt many readers to dip their toe in the stream of Thoreau’s prose.]