Born 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau could be considered the first environmental author, as he lived at one with nature in Walden Woods and shared his thoughts on preserving nature and finding God therein.
Lauren Hehmeyer, a history and English professor at Texarkana College, presented "Walking with Mr. Thoreau" at a meeting of Friends United for a Safe Environment on Tuesday, and told of his walks, his writings and his wonder of the Walden Woods.
"He walked," Hehmeyer said. "He walked every day in the afternoon and walked for hours. He said you should walk in the past as well as the present, and he was referring to the fact that he was conscious of the fact that there were other peoples who lived on that land before, that he had a sense of continuity of use of the land."
Hehmeyer received a grant in 2015 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to attend the Summer Institute on Transcendentalism and Reform in the Age of Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller. This summer, she and colleague Dr. Phyllis Deal will present at the Thoreau Bicentennial celebration in Concord, Mass., in July.
Concord was a genius cluster, Hehmeyer said, and Thoreau's famous cabin on Walden Pond was built on Emerson's land. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne also lived in the area, along with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote "Little Women."
Thoreau's observational abilities were honed during his walks, Hehmeyer said, and he often turned people down who wanted to walk with him.
"He said 'walking is best done alone' and had to be rude sometimes," she said. "He wrote, 'I'm not going to walk with you. I need to be alone in the woods.' He considered that to be valuable enough that it was worth offending people."
Of those walks, he said if you go on them every day, and by moonlight, at some point you might reach the sublime, the idea that by touching nature, you touched God. Hehmeyer went on to say that while Thoreau was a transcendentalist, he didn't get into extreme detail, instead preferring to focus primarily on the whole experience of the walks.
"Thoreau didn't really get down to that kinds of detail," she said. "He just knew that when you were in the woods something special happened between you and whatever forces there are. He was worried that he was getting too caught up in the detailed beauty of nature and what's inside of nature instead of the sublime. He wrote about this conflict in himself, that there's two kinds of appreciation of nature."
He died of tuberculosis in 1862, and is buried on Author's Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, along with Emerson and Hawthorne. Although he was a man of many words, his headstone bears a simple inscription of "Henry."
More information about Thoreau can be found at www.thoreausociety.org and www.walden.org.