Escaping

The first page of “Higher Laws”-related material in A contains words that would find their ultimate home in paragraph 1 of “The Village.” The words follow naturally from the preceding pages, in which material destined for “The Village,” paragraph 1, together with some material destined for “Economy,” paragraph 90, succeeds material destined for “The Bean-Field.” “After reading & writing or working in my field in the forenoon,” writes Thoreau, a few pages before the beginning of the “Higher Laws” material, “I usually bathed again in the pond swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and smoothed out the last wrinkle of thought or shook the dust of labor from my feet & clothes, and for the afternoon was as free as the bird that has built its nest and reared its brood.”Most quotations from the manuscript in this essay represent Thoreau’s text as revised on the manuscript surface. Except as noted, no attempt is made to represent text rejected in the process of revision.

He continues, “Every day or two – I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on here.” In an effort to withstand the “terrible standing invitation” to call at every one of the houses in the village, where company was expected, he either walked on boldly or sang praises to the gods like Orpheus, who drowned out the voices “of the Sirens”—as we read on the first line of our first page—“and kept out of danger.’“Page numbers in left or right margin of MS most likely added by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

Detail: Top of HM 924, 1:191. “133” in Thoreau’s hand.
Manuscript page from Version A of the "Walden" manuscript with material found in "The Village," paragraph 1 and "The Ponds," paragraphs 1 and 2, in "Walden" as published (1854).
HM 924 Volume 1, p. 191

“Sometimes I bolted suddenly & nobody could tell my whereabouts,” he continues in a new paragraph. Occasionally he permitted himself to enter one of the houses and be entertained with news until he “was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.”

“Sometimes having had a surfeit of human society & gossip – and worn out all my village friends – I rambled still further westward than I habitually dwell,” begins the next paragraph, which in the published Walden becomes the first part of the first paragraph of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:191.

“Sometimes, after my hoeing was done for the day,” begins the next paragraph, the initial words of which appear on the last line of our first page, “I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing since morning on the pond.” The word “Sometimes” is canceled, however, and replaced by “Or else.” “Or else” becomes “Occasionally” in the published Walden, and this paragraph becomes the second one of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Bottom of HM 924, 1:191.

“Occasionally after staying in a villagers parlor till the family had all retired – I have returned to the woods,” begins the next paragraph in A, with “Occasionally” canceled and replaced by “Sometimes.” The rest of this page and almost all of the next contains material that would become paragraph 4 of “The Ponds.” However, just above the beginning of the paragraph, Thoreau has inserted, in pencil, “In warm evenings &c–v”, a cross-reference to material written vertically in the left margin of the subsequent page, material that he has clearly decided should precede the paragraph about staying in a village parlor and indeed becomes paragraph 3 of “The Ponds.”

Detail: Middle of HM 924, 1:192.
Manuscript page from Version A of the "Walden" manuscript with material found in "The Ponds," paragraphs 2 and 4 in "Walden" as published (1854).
HM 924 Volume 1, p. 192

An interesting feature of these paragraphs is that their “habitual aspect”—the grammatical term for constructions indicating repeated action, marked here by adverbials such as “sometimes,” “occasionally,” “every day or two, and “in warm evenings”—makes them highly portable. While at Walden Thoreau did many things repeatedly, almost any one of which could be assimilated to almost any one of the themes providing structure to his later division of the text into chapters. His tinkering with these adverbial constructions to ensure variety suggests that he recognizes how heavily he leans on them.

But this series of habitual constructions in A also has a thematic valence of its own. The line of thought that runs through them is this: Whatever I was doing, especially if I had been to the village, but even if I had been hoeing beans, I was eager to get back to the woods or the water—that is, we might say, to the wild.

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