If the large number of visitors flocking to Massachusetts’s Walden Pond State Reservation each year are any indication, the life of Henry David Thoreau continues to exert a powerful hold on our collective imagination. That’s certainly true for Canadian poet and novelist Helen Humphreys who, in order to novelize Thoreau’s life in Followed by the Lark, read all his journals—some forty-seven manuscript volumes—to let “his voice guide hers.” Her “Henry,” as the narrator calls him, is a friendly antidote to the self-righteous, go-it-alone libertarian favored by off-the-grid preppers, emerging more as a brother and companion, longing for intimacy even as he shuns it.

Humphreys produces some vivid snapshots. In one scene, Henry clasps the stiffened body of his brother, dying of lockjaw. In another, he evades the emotional pain confided in him by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife Lidian, then regrets his cowardice. Henry feels lonely while walking in the woods with a friend named Edward, then accidentally starts a forest fire. The character’s most enduring relationship is with his younger sister Sophia: we see them repeatedly exchange elliptical one-liners at their parents’ home in Concord, where both lived out their lives: “Bluebird, he said when they passed on the stairs. Catkin, she whispered to him at dinner”; “Snipe, said Sophia, when she passed Henry on the landing. Old news, he said. I heard it yesterday.”

These snapshots, though occasionally slight and disconnected, are moving in their totality, distilling a whole life into vivid vignettes. Humphreys’s language can delight: spring is a “green furnace,” the blackbirds are a “choir that moved the marsh grass this way and that with the strength of their song alone.” But sometimes Humphreys overwrites, as if she doesn’t quite trust readers to grasp her point. For example, as Henry ponders the source of nocturnal sounds, which others prefer to leave a mystery, the narrator adds: “This was just another example, for Henry, of how his life was so different from the lives of his fellow citizens.” It all feels a little too didactic.

Henry’s voice, too, frequently adopts a moralizing tone. When Sophia worries that she has denied the local squirrels their winter forage by collecting acorns to sketch, Henry tells her that “by burying them, those squirrels are planting our future forests…. A much more worthwhile pastime.” Unlike the historical Thoreau, Humphreys’s Henry reserves the bulk of his critiques for the domestic, not the political, sphere. The novel rightly credits Thoreau’s female relatives for beating him to the cause of anti-slavery: we see his older sister Helen pasting over the pages in a slaveholder’s account book with stories from abolitionist newspapers as an act of defiance. But Humphreys largely omits Thoreau’s drive to wake up his neighbors, an explicit aim of his classic Walden. Henry’s quietism in the novel is startling, even jarring: Thoreau extolled the anti-slavery militant John Brown as a martyr and vehemently condemned his fellow citizens for their complicity with the Fugitive Slave Act; but when Henry learns of Brown’s death, he soothes his pain with birdwatching, observing that “the plants and animals had not noticed a change.” 

Perhaps Humphreys intended Followed by the Lark as an act of love. But by making Henry so intimate, familiar, and relatable—by quite literally “domesticating” him—her novel betrays the historical Thoreau, who would have condemned it as facile—“easy reading.” Thoreau chides us for treating “great poets” as if they were fortune-tellers, and tells us to “stand on tiptoe” when we read.

Distance can be salutary. Across his writings, Thoreau often speaks of the value of self-alienation as a “doubleness” that we can and should cultivate. With a double mind, Thoreau says, he can “stand as remote from [himself] as from another,” so that he can inhabit both “the driftwood in the stream, and Indra in the sky looking down on it.” This deific projection can appear self-aggrandizing. But it isn’t: the eye-in-the-sky vision instead deflates us, inviting us to see ourselves impersonally, as objects as worthy of curiosity as any other. For Thoreau, only as strangers do we manage to see each other as the bearers of divinity we really are. Alienation makes us present as closeness cannot.

Readers seeking a different kind of intimacy with Thoreau should turn instead to Lawrence Buell’s Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a helpful primer on the historical Thoreau’s thought. It’s short, but thorough: Buell considers Thoreau’s biography as well as his reception by later acolytes and scholars, his journaling and methods of composition, his interest in Indigenous peoples, and his commitments to science as it was then developing. Buell succeeds at defamiliarizing Thoreau, leaving us better equipped to grasp the complexity of his project. 

Buell’s book achieves that in part by showing how apparent oppositions in Thoreau’s writing actually work together. As Buell argues, “the relationship between the political Thoreau and Thoreau the poet-naturalist was as much a symbiotic tension as a complete antithesis.” How do we reconcile the writer who cataloged all the colors of blue in Walden Pond’s water with the political proselytizer for small government? Buell helps us see how Thoreau’s vision of better human government follows from his careful attention to the rules governing the natural world. Grasping both requires a disciplined distance. 

Thoreau’s refusal of superficial mysticism and his insistence on viewing society and nature with detached objectivity set him apart from his fellow Concordian Transcendentalists. It’s true that he shared their desire to transcend Calvinist doctrines of human depravity with a more optimistic view, in which humans can freely cultivate the sparks of divinity within themselves. And Walden is a prime example of Thoreau’s Emersonian self-reliance. But, as Buell argues, Thoreau “was always more disposed than his Transcendentalist confreres toward empiricism,” channeling their idealism into a passionate materialism. As Thoreau aged, his journals shifted from the meditative toward the statistical. He devoted more and more space to tracking temperatures, stream levels, bloom times, and the like. Science and aesthetics could be mutually enriching: Thoreau believed, for instance, that a “trained botanical eye” could more easily “render subtleties of color and form in landscape painting.” (This may be why his sketches are so beautiful.)

Scientific objectivity also helped Thoreau discern his place in the world. Even as he practiced ever-more “systematic” forms of data gathering, Buell writes, Thoreau rejected the professionalizing of science, its drive “toward suppressing the subjective factor in the investigation of natural phenomena so as to achieve maximum objectification.” As Buell recounts, Thoreau “never sought to study botany as such, but simply wished to become better acquainted with his nonhuman neighbors.”

Thoreau’s understanding of Darwin is particularly illuminating. While later writers would extract from Darwin a justification for social hierarchy that saw the richest as the best-adapted, Thoreau, Buell writes, mined Origin of Species for “its insights about species distribution, not species mutability.” The process of regrowth by distribution was the subject of one of Thoreau’s late unfinished manuscripts, “The Dispersion of Seeds,” which overturned assumptions about the way flora develop in a given landscape. Thoreau argued that plants emerged not by “spontaneous generation,” as was widely believed, but by “the many random-seeming ways, imperceptible to the unpracticed eye…by which natural agents broadcast seeds.” In other words, the “mystery” of plant generation was only apparently random; indeed, more detached observation and rigorous perception of plants’ underlying patterns and micro-scale agency revealed that their generation was not random, and no mystery at all. 

The scientific distinction between dispersion and competition also forms, at least for me, the core of Thoreau’s social critique in Walden. Competition has ruined us: though it seems to valorize the individual, it instead locks us into conformity, hitching our unique creative powers to the acquisition of more material possessions. Dissemination, by contrast, is a truly collective activity. But it is also carried out by individuals, each following—like certain species of plants—their own genius. Couldn’t that, and not competition, be the creative engine of earthly life?

If it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, Thoreau offers something better: not just imagining but practicing the end of capitalism. The work of seemingly atomized agents belongs to a pattern, driven not by supernatural forces but by our power. Humans have built a ruinous system, but we can build a better one. We are, in fact, responsible for doing just that. The imperative to compete and consume does not originate from some source beyond us; we construct it as we consent to it. Rejecting that imperative, Thoreau suggests, requires us to become strangers to the communities we participate in. We need productive alienation to avoid the despair of falling into patterns we mistakenly believe cannot change. Our failure to know our freedom and our choice to give away our power paralyze us in the face of our own collective betrayals, whether chattel slavery in Thoreau’s time or climate disaster now.

In Walden, Thoreau says that we must get “completely lost, or turned round” to see our position in “the vastness and strangeness of Nature.” Indeed, it’s only then that we “realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” Thoreau was committed to seeing humans as a collective species—not lords of our domain, but codependent beings engrossed in a shared habitat. Realizing that requires distance, detachment, estrangement: we must go away from ourselves, from our individual interests and concerns, our social habits and habitats, from our assumptions and even from our language, in order to return more free. That won’t just make us better people. It will also make us better neighbors, citizens, and friends. 

Followed by the Lark 
A Novel
Helen Humphreys
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$18 | 240 pp.

Henry David Thoreau
Thinking Disobediently
Lawrence Buell
Oxford University Press
$19.95 | 152 pp.