Leviathan or The Whale

who has discovered only the values of whale bone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale?
    Henry David Thoreau,
The Maine Woods

    From October 1849 to July 1855–as Melville researched, wrote and published
Moby-Dick
–Henry David Thoreau undertook his walking tours of Cape Cod, having only recently emerged from his seclusion at Walden Pond, near Concord, where, in a two-year-long experiment, he sought to test the tenets of Transcendentalism.
    The Transcendentalists, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, sought a return to nature in order to feel God’s true presence. Hawthorne saw them as ‘queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals’–Victorian hippies, all but rehearsing Woodstock; they were satirized by Melville, too, for their romanticism: not least in the person of Ishmael himself. But for Thoreau, born in Concord in 1817, Walden was an escape from personal tragedy: the loss of his brother John, who had cut his finger when shaving and three days later died of lockjaw.
    Walden was then still a wilderness, albeit one newly overshadowed by a railway embankment, built by the navvies from whom Thoreau bought his shack. Its sixty-one-acre pond is deeper in parts than Massachusetts Bay, with sandy shores shelving quickly to glacial black depths. Hawthorne found the water ‘thrillingly cold…like the thrill of a happy death…None but angels should bathe there.’ I saw no celestial beings when I swam there, but at the far end of the shore, in a glade beneath the pines and birches, there was a cairn of stones left by pilgrims to the site of Thoreau’s hut.
    Here, in a room under-tenanted by squirrels and racoons, the philosopher attempted a self-sufficiency of one. Here he recorded the minutiæ of the natural cycle, and his attempts to live with it. It was as if he had stalled his civilized life and re-geared it to natural forces. Like Hawthorne, who visited him there, seclusion charged his imagination. Thoreau revelled in the retreat of the day, and in the hours slowed by the calm surface of the water.
    As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

    He was almost childishly fascinated by the process of nature through which he hoped to examine the essence of existence.
Walden
, his account of those two years, is an alternative text for an industrial age, a kind of corollary to
Moby-Dick
. Axiomatic, philosophical, naïve and complex, it sometimes speaks with the voice of angels, sometimes with earthbound science. The writing of it is the true reason why Thoreau carried out his experiment, but that does not diminish its power. In his personal utopia, Thoreau sought to reinvent the way we could live. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.’ He rejected the wisdom of the old–‘Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost’–and felt a sense of hubris in the manner in which he might mark his own immortality.
    What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

    Words came to Thoreau like a prophet of the new age, challenging the divisions wrought by his fellow men in their headlong pursuits. While at Walden, Thoreau protested against slavery and war by refusing to pay his taxes, a civil disobedience that earned him a night in gaol. Now aged thirty-two, and with only twelve years left before consumption took him, this man whom Hawthorne described as ‘ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed’, yet whose character became him ‘much better than beauty’, had returned to Concord–barely two miles distant, yet a universe away.
    With
Walden
published but, like
Moby-Dick
, hardly a success, Thoreau still felt the pull of nature, often travelling with his young cousin and intimate companion, Edward Hoar. Like Ishmael, Thoreau was drawn to the ocean. It was an irresistible lure for a loner–an
‘Isolato
living on a separate continent of his own’–to seek out something greater and confront it; to seek refuge, too, from one’s own self. The sea drew Thoreau out of the woods and onto the beach; the forest gave way to the ocean, the one opening out from the other. Yet neither was what it seemed, and like all desires, they were dangerous forces.
    The Cape was barely more tamed than when the Pilgrims had made landfall there two hundred years before. Charles Nordhoff, who visited it around that time, bemoaned the ‘not over agreeable diversity