A Transcendentalist at Work

CAN WE DETECT ANY ECHO of a life gone by, any trace of a spirit, in the places where a person lived? No, I ordinarily think. Though I am inclined toward religion, I am a brazen rationalist when it comes to spirit rapping, séances, and such. But as I walk through the garret where Henry David Thoreau spent the last 12 years of his life, where he finished Walden and wrote most of his Journal, I am not so sure. The rooms are completely empty, yet there is something here.

Thoreau’s iconic cabin at Walden Pond has been exhaustively documented. Even its nails are treated like holy relics. The third-floor garret, however, is rarely visited because the house has remained private since he and his family owned it. Yet I doubt any place outside the natural world exudes Thoreau’s spirit more.

Thoreau lived at 255 Main Street, Concord, from August 29, 1850, to his death on May 6, 1862. His parents and sister Sophia lived below him, as did various aunts at different times, in addition to the boarders his mother, Cynthia, took in. (The family also sheltered runaway slaves in 1851 and 1853.) The 1820 structure, which Thoreau called the Yellow House, is now the Thoreau-Alcott House, Louisa May Alcott having bought it after Sophia’s death in 1876. The elegant main floors, now grandly expanded, are furnished with handsome colonial and Victorian antiques. Thoreau’s spare apartment above, which I recently had a chance to visit and photograph, is strikingly different.

Everything in it has to “the track of a higher life than the otter’s, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty … to exhilarate and recreate us?”