Two Visions
In Walden, the chapter “Higher Laws” offers not one vision of health, but two. “The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and tusks,” writes Thoreau, “which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual.”Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton UP, 1971), p. 219.
In humans, Thoreau suggests, these two kinds of health do not live in peaceful co-existence.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.
Just a few chapters back, in “Solitude,” Thoreau’s view of health seemed less divided. “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?” he asked there, answering “Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness.” And he continued: “For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black-schooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air.”Walden, p. 138.
When we get to “Higher Laws,” Nature is no longer an unequivocal source of health, a panacea merely, but something more complicated, even a potential obstacle to health—human health, at least. In the later chapter Thoreau has, in the words of Robert Milder, “worked round to what is probably the most startling sentence in Walden: ‘Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome.’”Robert Milder, Reimagining Thoreau (Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 132.
We do not propose to explain how on earth Thoreau works round to such a stunning prescription. But we do propose to follow how he gets there on paper. For the two visions of health offered in “Higher Laws” are not only a long way, logically, from the vision offered in “Solitude” but also a considerable distance from the material in Thoreau’s first draft of Walden out of which “Higher Laws” developed. Following Thoreau’s revisions to this material, we believe, is bound to reinforce the impression that the two visions of “Higher Laws” represent not an evolution in Thoreau’s thinking but an eruption of conflicting views and conflicted feelings that, within the covers of Walden at least, are never satisfactorily reconciled.