What did Thoreau believe about reading?

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I’ve wanted to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau for some time, for several reasons.

• I’ve quoted Thoreau to begin my own writing more than once, so I should probably read the original source.

• It’s a classic text as well as a cultural keystone for understanding our society.

• I’d like to think I share some of his beliefs about living an intentional life.

Our current situation has renewed the relevance of the experiment Thoreau documents in Walden: For two years, he lived alone in the woods with minimal interaction with others (Walden is the name of the pond next to his location). He built a simple cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land and called it home.

While Thoreau’s work is most commonly associated with concepts such as solitude and simplicity, he devotes one chapter in Walden to reading. What does he have to say about this subject and skill? Are his beliefs relevant to today’s readers? Next are three insights I noted about literacy from own reading of the chapter.

Reading should be a rigorous activity.

Thoreau believed that reading was the noblest of activities and demanded an equivalent effort on the reader’s end to discern the message from the writer.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. (99)

This statement reminds me of calls from some of today’s reading experts for close reading of complex texts. It also brings to mind Maryanne Wolf’s excellent lead to her book Proust and the Squid (another text I’ve been meaning to tackle): “We were never born to read.” Successful reading requires a specific skill set as well as intention to understand a text in depth.

That said, Thoreau’s historical context plus full access to life’s resources (he attended Harvard) might have limited his perspective on the role that joy and support plays into reading success. How does one “read true books in a true spirit” if they cannot access the text as he could? As an example, I am reading the annotated version of Walden, edited by Jeffrey Cramer.

There are so many cultural references from the mid-1800s that would have been lost on me without Cramer’s explanations in the margins. Thoreau also alludes to mythology in many section, which are also supported by Cramer’s annotations. My reading was just as rigorous and more enjoyable because I chose to have these supports in place.

Too many people read lighter fare.

The lack of deep reading observed in his Concord, Massachusetts community was a concern of Thoreau’s. He believed that by not regularly engaging with challenging texts, people were becoming less intelligent as they grew older. In his view of many fellow citizens, reading was only a function for going about their daily lives.

Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on the tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. (102)

Statements such as this are echoed in today’s calls for the falling rate of devoted readership. The Internet and a culture of distraction are largely blamed.

Yet what we know today about becoming a reader seems to somewhat contradict what Thoreau accepted as truth. For instance, studies have shown that emerging readers become lifelong readers by first reading lots and lots of easy texts. Wise teachers offer many options of high-interest books in their classroom libraries that attract students to continue reading more complex texts more naturally and with guided support.

Thoreau also believed that a lack of commitment to continuous literacy would lead to premature emotional and physical decline.

The result is dullness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations (lack of vitality), and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. (103)

Actually, there is recent evidence to support this theory. An article in The Washington Post summarized a study that found “book readers survived almost two years longer than those who didn’t crack open a book.”

Reading is a lifelong activity.

The idea that reading and learning was something you did largely in school seemed foreign to Thoreau. He contributed the loss of time to more recreational pursuits to the increased work demands that usually accompany traditional achievements.

It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure - if they are indeed so well off - to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. (107)

Thoreau was critical of higher education and questioned the outcomes students garnered from their studies. Pursuing knowledge and truth throughout a lifetime was a more likely path to prosperity, especially in light of a changing world.

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in found a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal, but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change or accident. (97)

This pursuit of truth was a main driver in Thoreau’s experiment of living a simple life and shuffling off many of the day’s trappings. He deemed reading to be a morally and intellectually enhancing endeavor, a practice that did not come naturally but was part of an intentional vocation for understanding one’s world more clearly.

It also seems clear to me that, without Thoreau’s devotion to reading, we would not have this literary classic.