PREFACE

(to “Walden-ish”)

Walden-ish is an adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 treasured book, Walden; or Life in the Woods (often abbreviated as just Walden). It’s one of America’s most celebrated texts. Like any great book, it’s more than a book – it’s a symbol of a different way of engaging with the world. To me, it’s almost a spiritual text, one that profoundly changed how I think about my place in this world and how I move throughout my day-to-day life.

Though Walden was a literary masterpiece–one cited by Gandhi, MLK Jr, and Tolstoy–I was lucky enough to avoid being assigned the book to read in high school. As I worked through it at 32 years old, I wondered why anyone would think that a teenager would get much out of it. Walden was a book meant to be read slowly, once one has found themselves at a place in life where things don’t really make much sense anymore. When you take a moment to breathe, look around, and wonder “what is everyone actually doing?” That moment can only come once you’ve had a chance to get caught up in life, notice what’s happening, and then feel confused about what you’re even doing on Earth. Often, this chain of events is prompted by a big personal “failure,” loss, or disappointment of some kind. It can happen at any age, but doesn’t happen before prom, for most. 

I chose Walden off a bookstore shelf in 2020 because I thought it would be an adventure story about a guy in the woods, roughing it in the wild against all odds. It was hilariously the opposite of that. Instead, Thoreau spent most of his days swimming in Walden Pond, listening to the birds, smelling flowers, and pondering life’s oddities. He visited town regularly, sometimes to eat with friends, and sometimes to drop off his laundry at his mom’s. I chuckled to myself frequently while reading–sometimes at Thoreau’s quirky thoughts, and more often because of the weird synchronicities that made me put the book down, look around, and wonder if I was being filmed. This book was published in 1854, but it may as well have been yesterday. Our biggest human struggles have always been consistent. We’ve been wrestling with the same existential questions for all of recorded history, and likely longer. 

Thoreau’s take on things reset my compass. His words were the ones I needed to hear most when I felt lost in the hum of society’s chaos, wondering what really mattered to me. So many others were going through the same things in 2020. But when I brought the book up to friends, most replied with some variation of “Walden?...oh yeah I think I read that in high school. About a guy living in the woods?” There was no chance they’d be picking that book up again. Their teen interpretation of it had seared a permanent “STUPID/BORING” stamp on it forever. They’d been exposed too young.

However profound the takeaways, getting through the book was still a struggle for me. I had to work for those nuggets. Beyond Thoreau’s complicated syntax and jumbled [yet admittedly poetic] sentence structures, he was also using the standard language of the times, which was over-the-top masculine and patriarchal. He only spoke of “townsmen,” “mankind,” and “brothers.” Innocent enough, sure, but still a jagged reminder that the book wasn’t written for me. I would change that with my edits, of course. As I dug deeper into Thoreau’s life and writings to strengthen my knowledge of his viewpoints and style, I found things in his journal that…weren’t very nice. He had a clear distaste for women’s society–and thus logically following–most women. Though he loved and respected a few special women (mostly family members and the wives of close friends), he generally poked fun at women’s intelligence, morals, and motives. 

“She can entertain a large thought with hospitality, and is not prevented by any intellectuality in it, as women commonly are. In short, she is a genius, as a woman seldom is…” (November 13, 1851, journal entry)

Oh, yikes. Though his journal was more explicit with opinions, his true thoughts still crept through the pages of Walden:

“...But before the owner gave me a deed of [the house], his wife—every man has such a wife—changed her mind and wished to keep it.” 

“The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not there.” 

His pokey comments and gendered omissions felt like jabs to the heart, as if I was the friend who didn’t get invited to the birthday party because I wasn’t cool or smart enough. Or maybe because I was missing a penis. I felt betrayed by Thoreau, an otherwise kind and thoughtful man, who somehow couldn’t extend his compassion to the women in his society. Would he have considered me worthy of conversation, or capable of understanding his writings? Why did he have such a hard time offering his townswomen grace and understanding, when they were not allowed to be educated, vote, work outside of the home, or even have radical thoughts to themselves? Though Thoreau was typically a fighter for the oppressed (he was a well-known abolitionist, conservationist, and generally compassionate man who even mourned the loss of trees cut down in his village), he wasn’t able to apply that same empathetic attitude to the women around him. He was a man of the times, and struggled to separate his townswomen from their conditioning–innocent victims trapped in systems of oppression, doing their best to survive in a world created by men, for men.

But also contained in Walden, there were passages that nudged me along. “There is more day to dawn…It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” I imagined Thoreau tossing about and mourning from his grave, wishing he’d been able to see what he sees now–removed from the first-person perspective, and perhaps realizing that his own romantic rejections could have played a part in his attitudes toward women. I couldn’t help but to forgive him. And now, editing Walden wasn’t just for me anymore, it was for him, too.

The revision work became increasingly more involved as the project progressed. For three years, this book was my life. I pulled in excerpts from his journal, and added my own words where appropriate. I visited Walden Pond and explored the town of Concord, sitting at Thoreau’s grave for advice. I modernized complicated and outdated prose, neutered unnecessarily gendered language, restructured sentences and paragraphs for digestibility, softened some crassness, and edited miscellaneous items to add to the general flow and inclusiveness of the text (get in-depth info about these editing details and philosophies at krimdom.com/waldenishprocess). I hope that my adaptation amplifies the intended messages for you, and makes Thoreau’s thoughts even more of a joy to read.

This work was truly a labor of love, and I consider it to be the most important work I’ve ever done–making a timeless, powerful book accessible to all. Now more than ever, our society can benefit from the messages of natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty found in this classic work of American literature. 

As you read this book, I hope you are able to feel the personal nature of the messages within, and know that it is no accident. This book was written for you.

Krimsey