Not long ago, I attended a discussion at the Vineyard Haven Library on the subject of what Henry David Thoreau would want us to do in our own time. It was conducted by a group of people who had produced a book of essays on that subject. The book commemorated the 200th Anniversary of Thoreau’s birth.

One of the panelists, Peter Alden, the best selling author of a great many field guides and other similar works, said that Thoreau’s Walden had anticipated Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guides to the Birds. He added that Walden also served many other purposes and that some of its sentences were difficult to understand.

I agreed particularly with his last two points but came away more convinced than ever that Walden is not much like a field guide but is better compared to a great book such as Moby Dick which was written around the same time.

Each of these two works attends carefully to its particular subject. The narration is accompanied by a good deal of reflection; the writer is trying not just to describe his subject but to interpret and understand it.

In the second chapter, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Thoreau says: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

In other words, one may not really understand the situation in which one is living just by living it.

In the main, Walden helps presents a process of understanding so that in living one’s life one may also become conscious of what one is doing. It is a work primarily of interpretation, of both seeing and apprehending.

In his chapter, Reading, Thoreau says that in our ordinary pursuits we are mortal, but in dealing with truth we are immortal.

Thoreau’s writing can be difficult, something he happily owns up to. At one point he notes that in the Concord Public Library there is a section labeled Easy Reading. But, as he says, all of his favorite books require Hard Reading.

In Walden the environs are turned into a landscape of the mind. During his time in the woods, Thoreau devoted much time to meditation as on afternoons when like Walt Whitman he loafed and invited in his soul.

He writes of the various ways a scene looked and sounded, or seemed to be, in various seasons and times of day and night and on various dates extending as late as 1854, the year the book was published. He trains on Walden and its environs what he has learned from extensive reading especially in the non-Christian sacred texts of the ancient Far East.

It is telling that it took him nine years to write the book. He also made use of the conversations he had with visitors in his hut. In the course of these conversations he often found that he and his friend tended to keep moving their chairs further and further away from each other, giving each of them the space and time for reflection before speaking. The two of them would then have to listen more intently to try to compensate for the growing distance between them.

My suggestion as to what Thoreau would tell us to do is the following: read hard and continue to exercise your wits vigorously on what comes your way.

Robert Ganz lives in Chilmark.