In 1845, Henry David Thoreau embarked on a two year, two months, and two day experiment, living alone in a small cabin he built near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The purpose of the sojourn was clear:

“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” (Thoreau).

He goes on to write:

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” (Thoreau).

Thoreau published Walden in 1854, a recounting of his time in the woods and the lessons he learned. The book wasn’t commercially successful at first, selling only 2000 copies, but has gone on to enjoy considerable acclaim in the years following Thoreau’s death. Famed American poet, Robert Frost, once wrote of Walden: "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."

But there are a few misconceptions about Walden that often go undiscussed. This is no fault of Thoreau’s; this is the result of how we have interpreted his ideas and misremembered the history of his experiment.

That’s the first thing: Walden, to him, was always an experiment. It was never permanent. Going into the woods and living in solitude is not a viable life plan. Not even for a transcendentalist. It’s merely an exercise in clarity.

Also, it should be noted that while Thoreau did live by himself, he didn’t shun the notion of human contact. In fact, every week he walked into a nearby town to purchase supplies. He also left three empty chairs in front of his cabin so as to welcome passing strangers.

Lastly, for all of Thoreau’s effectiveness at posthumously melding pastoral transcendentalism into a broader American ethos, the idea of retreating into the stark isolation of nature in order to uncover a more profound truth about oneself or the world predates him. Compared to the 114,634 words of Walden, the Germans have a single splendid word that communicates roughly the same idea: “Waldeinsamkeit” or “the feeling one has while being alone in the woods, usually a sublime or spiritual one.”

This isn’t to lessen the impact of Thoreau’s work. I, for one, have taken inspiration in his writings and his philosophy on life. At the same time, as somebody who has traveled alone for the past five and a half weeks, and has often found himself in strange places, out-of-doors, with nobody who speaks his language, I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about the power of solitude as well as the shortcomings of language. It’s worth noting that Thoreau spent four times as long working on Walden as he did living there. It’s difficult to articulate that which you experience alone.

It is especially challenging to articulate the sublime. Grand, incomprehensible scenes of beauty are something with which I’ve gotten very familiar. Be they mountains, waterfalls, or palaces; I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot on this trip. And yet, I struggle to put into words what that experience has been like. The best I can say is the sublime is something that disrupts. One second you are walking and then you round the corner and stop dead. Before you: A valley stretched out in dusk. A mountain rising blue and stoic. A lake infinite, cerulean, and still. You look. You have no words.

Human language is fallible. There is much we can’t communicate. Even those trained in communicating — we call them writers — acknowledge this.

I recently finished Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-five, which opens, quite famously:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names (Vonnegut).

Slaughterhouse-five was published in 1969 at the height of anti-war sentiment in the United State. It is a novel about and against war; primarily, it focuses on providing testimony to the events surrounding the fire bombing of Dresden during World War II, an atrocity through which Vonnegut really lived. At first blush, it is curious that the novel employs time-travel, aliens, optometry, and birds as the main vehicles to tell a story of a war. But, digging a little deeper, one can see Slaughterhouse-five is a novel about the inability to go back in time, regain innocence, process trauma, and articulate the horrors of war.

The ending of the book is told to us at the very beginning. A little bird asks Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, “poo-tee-weet?” Why? Because:

there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?” (Vonnegut).

“Poo-tee-weet” is about as good a thing as any to say about something indescribable.

Dresden after the bombings, 1946. Source: Business Insider.

And yet, for all the shortcomings of human language, it is perhaps the most important invention in the world. It’s the reason why we have poodles, cryptocurrency, sushi restaurants in New York, etc. Individually, we humans know very little — less today even than our hunter-gather ancestors probably did. Our society is increasingly specialized, and everything from avocados to the internet I can access thanks to the collective knowledge and communicability of humans past and present.

And yet, I can find no right way to tell you how I felt sitting beneath Staubbach Falls the other night. I can relate that I was talking on the phone with my dad. I can say that the stars came out during the phone call and by the end of it I could see the milky way. It was opaque. It did not glow. It was a lighter patch of sky extending directly above me to beyond the cliff where the waterfall came into view. The waterfall was 300 feet tall at least, and continued to rain down without hesitation. It did not care about my preferences, fears, hopes, dreams. This did not fill me with despair, nor did I feel particularly inspired by it. I simply had no words, but to say I felt meager by comparison.

This, I believe, is the most basic effect of the sublime, and what Thoreau meant when he strove to “front only the essential facts of life…and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

In some ways, I’ve reduced my life to terms far lower than ever before. I carry my pantry around in a reusable grocery bag, along with my backpack, and a small suitcase. Thus everything I need is on my person at all times. I eat everything I buy. I sleep whenever I can. I venture into unknown spaces and back without anyone questioning my disappearance. I am, according to some definitions, free.

But, of course, I am not wholly free. As Theodor Roosevelt quite famously underscored, there is a difference between freedom from and freedom to. I’m free to wander, lounge, eat, sleep. I am not free from worry, the stress of planning or budgeting, the desire to socialize, or physical pain. This last category is something I’ve thought a lot about lately; mostly because I believe it relates deeply to the sublime. Both fall into the category of “qualia,” or an “individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.” I’d argue the smell of rain or the color red fall into this category as well. How do I really know that what you call the smell of rain is the same odor I experience? How do I know my red isn’t your blue, and visa versa? In some ways, this philosophical line of thinking is a bit pedantic. After all, does it really matter if our hues aren’t exactly the same? Colorblind people have been coping with this truth for centuries. And yet, something about the indescribability of physical pain nags me.

At the beginning of my trip, I rolled my ankle, and have subsequently rolled it a few more times, despite doing my best to nurse it back to health. As a result, other parts of my body, such as my hip, have begun to get sore, most likely because they are compensating for a weak ankle. Now, this is a seemingly small problem. Surely global warming, infant mortality, and lack of clean drinking water are all more important. And yes, from a utilitarian point of view, they are. But it never fails to amaze me how attention-sucking pain can be. When I need to walk up four flights of stairs to get to my room in a hostel, and the right side of my body hurts with every step, and I have to grit my teeth and haul my luggage up each stair clunk clunk clunk, I’m not thinking about significant, global problems. I’m thinking about the pain. It’s all I can think about.

And that sentence, right there, doesn’t even do a good job of conveying the pain. Because it’s incredibly challenging to convey to somebody else the extent of your physical pain. Like, I can describe how my ankle feels like it will give out if I twist on it counterclockwise or the burning I feel in my anterior inferior tibiofibular ligament, but that isn’t really it. My ankle isn’t really weak or burning. Those words are just insufficient attempts to describe the qualia of physical sensation. They don’t capture what pain is. Pain is attention redirected.

Pain is like if I were to think of something like a beautiful garden with a bench in the center and how I wanted to walk to that bench and sit down so I go to walk and PAIN.

Pain disrupts.

That’s most of what I have to say about pain. I know my ankle will heal. I am lucky. With this in mind, I believe it is important to remain compassionate to those suffering from chronic pain, to try to comprehend their reality as best we can, and as a society, to reduce suffering as much as possible. Because when you are suffering, suffering is the realest thing there is.

In part, I’ve only had the time and space to come to these conclusions because of Waldeinsamkeit. It is, above all, a temporary state; useful, like medicine, in appropriate doses. But let that crucial distinction be noted: Temporary.

People often remember Thoreau as the Man who Went to the Woods. He also left the woods:

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one (Thoreau).”

There’s a truth implicit in that which I like very much: We can live multiple lives; we get to live multiple lives. Son, friend, teammate, boyfriend, father; student, writer, traveler, designer, researcher, goofball. Whitman once wrote,

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

We all do.

And yes, I’m aware that my ability to express those multitudes is partially the result of privilege, of a college education, of good health. But in general, there seems to be a trend towards dynamism in the world at large: The job market is more mutable than ever before; the idea of a single career is quickly becoming obsolete. Perhaps in school, we should ask children not what they want to be when they grow up, but how many things they wish to try.

And if they don’t know, that’s okay. Part of the wonder of life is not knowing, but trusting, and trying, and hoping, and living, and being — and being.