The Socrates Express

4. How to See like Thoreau

11:12 a.m. On board Amtrak’s Acela, Train No. 2158, en route from Washington, D.C., to Boston.

I am seated in the Quiet Car. We Quiet People eye each other approvingly and, of course, silently. We’re comrades in an undeclared war, entrenched in our own private Dunkirk, taking enemy fire, the odds not good, but holding firm. The Quiet Car is civilization at its most civilized, a bulwark against the barbarian raucousness that lies beyond.

It’s a futile attempt, judging by the conductor’s half-hearted reprimand of a couple of wayward passengers violating the “library-like atmosphere” that Amtrak has decreed. In our hearts, we Quiet People know the battle is already lost. Besides, whatever quiet prevails here is strictly an exterior phenomenon. Inside our heads, the decibel levels are off the charts. That’s the thing about lives of quiet desperation. They’re only quiet on the outside.

None of this matters, not now, when I have a small library of books, as well as my reassuringly analog notebook and pen. Suddenly the train lurches and my pen, a Japanese beauty crafted of stainless steel, a sublime union of aesthetic and ergonomic perfection, is gone.

I search under the seat, around the seat, in the seat. I get down on all fours and poke inside the surprisingly complex seat mechanism. This last contortion attracts a few sideways glances, but no reprimand, for I have been careful to conduct these maneuvers at the prescribed decibel levels.

I do not find my pen. Uncharacteristically, I do not care. The rhythmic motion of the train—not rocking, exactly, more like that of a rusty seesaw—quiets my mind while the scenery floats by: puffy white clouds smeared across the late-spring sky, the wide Susquehanna River, the posh seaside towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. All this I see. Or at least I think I do. Spend enough time reading philosophy and soon you’re not sure of anything.

Some are born Thoreau, others achieve Thoreau. Most have Thoreau thrust upon them.

Henry David Thoreau was thrust upon me in ninth grade. I couldn’t follow him, nor would I if I could. As I said, I am no woodsman. My life is not a model of simplicity. And while I do have reclusive tendencies, I prefer to do my recluding in a hotel room, not a tiny cabin without plumbing or decent Wi-Fi. I promptly exiled Walden to the Siberia of my brain, where it joined Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, and integral calculus.

A few weeks before my journey to Concord, I stumbled upon a New Yorker article about Thoreau. It was called “Pond Scum” and, as you can imagine, did little to rehabilitate the Hermit of Concord in my mind. The story’s author, Kathryn Schulz, opens the piece by painting a picture of a coldhearted, misanthropic crank. Then she takes the gloves off.

But as the commuter train pulls into Concord Station, just as it did during Thoreau’s day, I resolve to maintain an open mind. If I’ve learned anything from my philosophical investigations, it’s that first impressions are often wrong. Doubt is essential. It is the vehicle that transports us from one certainty to another. Slowly, making all local stops.

I’ve arrived in Concord with a plan. This chapter will be called “How to Live Alone like Thoreau” or “How to Live Simply like Thoreau” or, given the hypocrisies revealed in “Pond Scum,” perhaps “How to Pretend to Live Simply and Alone While Sneaking Off to Your Mom’s for Homemade Cookies like Thoreau.” His experiment in isolation wasn’t so isolated after all.

I take one step inside the Concord Free Public Library and see it’s not a typical small-town library. How could it be? Concord is not a typical small town. “The biggest little place in America,” as the novelist Henry James called it, played a pivotal role in the Revolutionary War—the shot heard round the world was heard here first—and, later, the Transcendentalist movement that birthed, among others, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau was born in Concord and, except for his time at Harvard and a brief (and unhappy) stint in New York, lived his entire life here. Thoreau loved Concord. Friends tried to convince him to see Paris, but he demurred. Even when he did travel, to Maine and Canada, he took Concord with him. “I carry Concord ground in my boots and in my hat—and am I not made of Concord dust?”

The Concord library, like all good ones, provides plenty of reading nooks. I step into one called the Transcendentalist Cove. The movement’s giants, frozen in marble, look down on me. There’s Emerson and Alcott and, of course, Thoreau. The bust is later Thoreau, bearded and owlish. It’s a kind face. Or is that a mask, concealing a dark, pond-scummy interior?

Thoreau’s favorite books, on display here, offer a few clues. Like Marcus, Thoreau was a wisdom scavenger. “I do not the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them,” he wrote. Thoreau read the ancient Greeks and Romans, but also sampled more exotic fare: The Analects of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita. Forager extraordinaire, he was among the first Western philosophers to mine Indian and Chinese sources. Good philosophy, like a good lightbulb, brightens the room. Where the bulb was manufactured, how much it cost, its wattage, its age, the science behind it—none of this matters as long as it illuminates the room. Illuminates your room.

Thoreau turned east for the usual reason: personal crisis. The year was 1837. He had just been fired from his teaching position at a Concord school for refusing to administer corporal punishment, as was the practice of the day. He was broke and directionless. Then he stumbled across a book, one thousand pages long and with a title to match: A Historical and Descriptive Account of British India. Thoreau slogged through it, and unearthed gems. These ideas, at once alien and familiar, wormed their way into his mind. “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi,” he wrote to a friend.

Thoreau, I think, was less yogi and more sannyasi. In Hindu tradition, a sannyasi is someone who, having discharged his familial obligations, relinquishes all material goods and retreats to the forest to pursue a purely spiritual life.

I turn a corner, and nearly collide with Leslie Wilson, curator of special collections. She is tall and trim, with alert, searching eyes. I like her. I like how she has lived with Thoreau for decades, yet not tired of him. I like how her admiration for the man hasn’t slipped into sycophancy.

Leslie tells me she regularly fields inquiries from the many “pilgrims, groupies, and crackpots” who swarm to Walden Pond every day, the irony of crowding into a temple of solitude apparently lost on them.

There’s nothing special about Walden, she tells me. “It’s a mosquitoridden swamp-hole.” She elongates “swamp-hole,” letting the words loiter on her tongue, savoring the delicious blasphemy. “There’s nothing magical about this place.”

To believe otherwise is to miss Thoreau’s point. Places are special to the extent we make them so. Don’t come to Walden, Thoreau would chide his twenty-first-century groupies. Find your own Walden. Better yet, make your own Walden.

Leslie disappears to a nearby safe, where she retrieves a piece of paper sheathed in plastic. It is the original manuscript of Thoreau’s essay “Walking.” The handwriting is expansive, with a wildness to it. Thoreau loved that word. “In wildness, there is preservation of the world,” he said. It’s often misquoted as “wilderness,” but that’s not what he meant. Wilderness exists out there. Wildness resides inside us. Wildness is strong and willful.

I examine the manuscript more closely, and notice the revisions. How Thoreau, for instance, changed “early in the afternoon” to “early in the summer afternoon.” A small change, but for Thoreau, the small mattered. It mattered not because he was fastidious, though he was that, but because in the details he found, if not God, certainly a mother lode of beauty.

I broach the subject of “Pond Scum” with Leslie, deploying diplomatic skills usually reserved for mentioning tax audits or genital warts. Yes, she’s read it. Everyone in Concord has. The article was unfair, but not inaccurate, she says. Thoreau was “not an easy guy to warm up to,” she tells me, in classic New England understatement.

Henry David Thoreau, hero of Walden, beloved icon of American lore, apostle of environmentalism, giant of letters, was something of a jerk. Everyone who knew him said so. Thoreau possessed “a certain iron-pokerishness, an uncompromising stiffness in his mental character,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. Others were less kind. “Thoreau was literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of manhood,” said Henry James Sr., father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher.

The harshest criticism centered on Thoreau’s alleged hypocrisy. There he was pretending to live alone in the woods, self-sufficient, while sneaking off to his mom’s for pie and laundry service.

It’s true. Thoreau wasn’t nearly as isolated at Walden as many believe. He regularly made the half-hour walk into town, not only for Mom’s home cooking but to visit the local post office or coffee shop. So was Walden a ruse? Have ninth graders nationwide been hoodwinked?

I don’t think so. Thoreau never claimed to have severed all ties with society. He doesn’t conceal his forays into town, or the visitors he received at his cabin. (Walden contains a chapter called “Visitors.”) As one Thoreauvian tells me, Walden isn’t a book about a man living in the woods. It’s a book about a man living.

As for Thoreau’s purported crankiness, guilty as charged. But that does not diminish the value of his wisdom. If crankiness disqualified a thinker, all of philosophy would be contained in a pamphlet.

I tell Leslie about my practical approach to philosophy, and ask what “how-to” question she thinks Thoreau addresses. I’m expecting the usual “How to live alone” or “How to live simply.”

“How to see,” she says, without hesitation.

“How to see?”

Yes, she says. All the rest—the simple living, the solitude, the naturalism—were in service of something larger: vision. Thoreau teaches us how to see.

I did not see this coming. I will investigate, I assure her.

“Good,” she says. “Have you read Thoreau?”

Oh yes, I say. Not only Walden, of course, but also his essays and even his obscure first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

“Not bad,” she says, as if praising a toddler who’s mastered Curious George. “But if you want to understand Thoreau, you need to read his journals.”

I promise her I will. Only later do I discover what I’ve gotten myself into.

Everyone who met Thoreau commented on his appearance. Some remarked on his nose, prominent and Roman, “a sort of interrogation mark to the universe”; others his mouth, “uncouth and somewhat rustic”; or his hands, “strong and skillful.” Others remarked on Thoreau’s eerily acute senses, like his keen ear (“He could hear the most faint and distant sounds”) and acute sense of smell (“No hound could scent better”).

But Thoreau’s eyes made the biggest impression. No two people saw them alike. “Strong serious blue eyes,” said one Concord resident. “Piercing eyes, like an owl’s,” recalls another. “Enormous eyes… [that] frightened me dreadfully at first,” recalls a third.

Thoreau’s vision was legendary. At a glance, he could estimate the height of a tree or the weight of a calf. He’d reach into a bushel of pencils and, by sight alone, grab exactly a dozen. He had a knack for finding buried Indian arrowheads. “There is one,” he’d say, kicking it up with his foot.

When it comes to the senses, philosophers are, as usual, divided. One school, known as the Rationalists, mistrusts the senses. Only our intellect, and the innate knowledge it contains, can lead us out of the cave and into the light. The Rationalist Descartes famously said Cogito, ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.” Another school, the Empiricists, believe our senses can indeed be trusted, and it is only through them that we come to know the world.

Thoreau refused to get twisted in such epistemological knots. Trustworthy or not, our senses are all we’ve got, he argued, so why not use them as best as we can? His was an outside-in philosophy.

Thoreau is considered a Transcendentalist, a member of a philosophical movement that can be summed up in four words: faith in things unseen. Thoreau, though, possessed an even stronger faith in things seen. He was less interested in the nature of reality than the reality of nature. Was there more to the world than meets the eye? Probably, but what does meet the eye is plenty miraculous, so let’s start there. Thoreau valued vision even more than knowledge. Knowledge is always tentative, imperfect. Today’s certainty is tomorrow’s nonsense. “Who can say what is? He can only say how he sees.”

How exactly do we see? Most of us subscribe to the photographic model of seeing. We believe our eyes capture images from the world like a camera, then relay these images to our brain. Our eyes “photograph,” say, the coffee mug in front of us.

It’s a nice model. It is also wrong. Seeing is less like photography and more like language. We don’t see the world so much as converse with it. What is that? Looks like a coffee mug, you say? Let me check my database and get back to you. Yep, it’s a mug. We don’t see the mug in front of us. We tell ourselves it is there. The coffee mug sends electromagnetic waves, nothing more, to our eye and brain. From that raw data, we create information, then meaning—in this case, that the object in front of us is called a “coffee mug.”

Sometimes we create meaning too quickly. Maybe what looks like a coffee mug is something else entirely. Quick to define objects and people, we risk blinding ourselves to their uniqueness. Thoreau guarded against this tendency. “Let me not be in haste to detect the universal law,” he tells himself. “Let me see more clearly a particular instance of it.” Postpone defining what you see and you will see more.

Thoreau slowed the process to a crawl. He elongated the gap between hypothesis and conclusion, between seeing and seen. Time and again, he reminds himself to linger. “We must look for a long time before we can see,” he said.

Seeing is subjective. The scientist’s detached “view from nowhere” was not a vista that interested Thoreau. For something to be truly seen, it must be seen from somewhere by someone. “Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective,” he wrote.

It’s impossible not to take beauty personally. A blood-red sunset. An ink-black night sky specked with countless stars. Personal verdicts, all of them. As the philosopher Roger Scruton said, “A world that makes room for such things makes room for you.”

For Thoreau, seeing and feeling were intertwined. He couldn’t see something if he didn’t feel it. How he felt determined not only how he saw but what he saw. For him, seeing was not only emotive but also interactive. When he saw, say, a rose, he corresponded with it and, in a way, collaborated with it. I realize that sounds odd, a tad unhinged. Many artists, though, describe a similar phenomenon: When they look at an object, they sense it looking back at them. They can’t all be nuts.

Read the journals. Leslie Wilson’s words lodge in my brain like a bad Top 40 song you can’t shake. Thoreau kept a journal most of his adult life, some two million words spanning fourteen volumes.

When I screw up my courage and turn to the first volume, I’m overcome with dread, and flash back to ninth-grade English class. As I read, the dread lifts, replaced by relief, and, ultimately, delight. In his journals, Thoreau comes alive in a way he doesn’t in Walden. This is Thoreau at his most honest, and vulnerable. “I never know, and shall never know, a worse man than myself,” he writes at one point.

We tend to think of Thoreau as—how do I say this diplomatically?—a wuss. Reading his journals set me straight. The pages reveal a virile Thoreau. Philosopher as action hero. He walks, skates, swims, tastes fermented apples, chops wood, sounds ponds, surveys lots, paddles upriver, builds houses, plays the flute, juggles, shoots (he was an expert marksman), and, on at least one occasion, stares down a woodchuck. He did all these activities to see better. “It needs the doing hand to make the seeing eye,” he said.

Thoreau wasn’t afraid to get his hands, or any other body part, dirty. In one journal entry, he describes immersing himself in a swamp up to his chin, feeling the cool mud against his skin, embracing the scum.

As I wade deeper into the journals, I hear echoes of Marcus and his Meditations. Like Marcus, Thoreau is having a conversation with himself. We, the reader, just eavesdrop. I hear Socrates, too. They are not obvious doppelgängers, these two. Centuries separate them. Thoreau wrote more than two million words, Socrates not a single one. Yet they are philosophical brothers.

Like Socrates, Thoreau led an examined life, one conducted with a “fearless self-inspection.” Like Socrates, Thoreau vacillated between terrific velocity and utter stillness. He walked four miles a day but could also, as one neighbor recalls, “sit motionless for hours, and let the mice crawl over him and eat cheese out of his hand.”

Both Socrates and Thoreau asked a lot of impertinent questions, which annoyed people. Both were pains in their respective eras’ asses. Useful irritants. Both paid a price. Athens put Socrates to death. Concord panned Thoreau’s writing.

Like Socrates, Thoreau believed all philosophy begins with wonder. He expresses this idea many times, in many ways, but my favorite is this simple line from Walden: “Reality is fabulous.” I love the way Thoreau sounds less like a philosopher and more like an awestruck teen. Maybe they’re not so different.

The Concord dust Thoreau wrote about so lovingly has today been efficiently hoovered from view. Twenty-first-century Concord is a cute-as-a-button New England town, with curated wine shops, precious cafés, and, on warm spring days, bicyclists in peacock colors astride their pricey rides. The sort of town where Thoreau, with his shabby clothes and undisciplined mane, would draw searching, albeit discreet, glances.

I have to give Concord this: it wears its history well. Everything is low-key. New England understated. Even the local Rite Aid and Starbucks sport tasteful, temporally appropriate architecture.

The town’s most famous son gets his due, of course. There is a Thoreau Street and a Thoreau School and a fitness center called, yes, the Thoreau Club. There is no Thoreau Water Park or Thoreau Wax Museum.

June 20 is the summer solstice. A good day, I figure, to contemplate the art of seeing. If we really are children of the light, then today is our birthday.

I wake early in order to… what? To be Thoreau? No. That’s neither possible nor advisable. But I figure by tracing the arc of his day, I might, for a moment, see the world through his eyes.

Thoreau, unlike Marcus, was a morning person. He savored those first moments of consciousness, that “debatable ground between dreams and thoughts,” and liked to quote this line from an ancient Indian text, the Vedas: “All intelligences awake with the morning.”

Bathing in the pond at dawn, Thoreau then dove into his “morning work,” reading and writing. He might refine a rough journal entry, or polish a chapter. The physical sensation of a hand moving across a page was for Thoreau, the occasional yogi, a kind of meditation.

Notebook and pen in hand, I devote my morning work to some nagging questions about Thoreau. What did he see in seeing? How did he manage to see so much? I stare at these questions for a long time. They stare back, mute. We’re at an impasse. So I do what Thoreau did when his muse absconded. I close my notebook and lace my walking shoes.

Every day, usually in the afternoon, Thoreau walked the Concord countryside. Like Rousseau, he couldn’t think clearly unless his legs were moving. While Rousseau embarked on reveries, Thoreau sauntered. (He loved that word.) He sauntered in order to shake the village and return to his senses.

Thoreau didn’t need a destination when he sauntered, but I do. In a blatant act of civil disobedience, I decide to ignore Leslie Wilson’s warning about visiting that overcrowded swamp-hole otherwise known as Walden Pond. I unfurl the little map of the trail leading from Concord to the pond. It’s less than two miles. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was more of a cabin on the outskirts of a vibrant little town. I cut Thoreau some slack. A book called Walden, or a Life in a Cabin Not Very Far at All from Civilization lacks commercial appeal.

I’m loading my backpack, a sleek urban model that Thoreau would never own, when I decide to do something out of character. I tuck my smartphone into the desk drawer and step outside without it.

It takes only a few minutes for the withdrawal symptoms to manifest: clammy skin, increased heart rate. It’s not that I feel naked without my phone. Naked I could handle. I feel as if I’ve departed on my walk without my liver or some other vital organ. Yet I soldier on.

I see why Thoreau liked to saunter here. The air is soft and cool, in repose. The ground feels plush underfoot. I’m reminded of what Thoreau’s friend John Weiss said of him: “He walked as if a great deal of surmising went on between the earth and him.” Not as much surmising goes on between the earth and me—small talk, really—but I soon find my stride. I’m determined to channel Thoreau’s visual acumen.

What I see first is a blur, approaching rapidly. The blur is wearing a denim bandanna and white earbuds. Arms pistoning, muscular legs pumping, she is the picture of efficiency. She is not sauntering.

I arrive at a body of water called Fairyland Pond and sit on a nearby bench. I look but I don’t see. “Go not to the object; let it come to you,” Thoreau chides, in that covertly critical way of his. “Pond scum,” I mutter.

It’s not working. I see nothing but hear everything: the whine of a propeller plane high overhead, the whoosh of a passing car from a road nearby. Twenty-first-century sounds. I owe my acute sense of listening to my years as an NPR correspondent. There I learned to hear what others might not. Everything has a sound. Even a seemingly dead-quiet room, if you listen hard enough. “Room tone,” audio engineers call it. I wonder: Is sensory acuteness transferable? Can I convert my keen ear into a keen eye?

The phantom vibrations in my pocket, emanating from where my phone should be, have dissipated. I become aware of a stillness. I experience a moment of what I believe is commonly called “peace.”

Then the mosquitoes strike. Some snipe at me, while others, more aggressive, dive-bomb. They’re annoying. I decamp and continue my amble. I’m contemplating Thoreau’s imperviousness to distraction when I slip on a wooden plank and nearly fall. That was close. I stop and regroup. I make a conscious effort to see, clearly and honestly, what nature proffers. To my surprise, this attempt works. I spot a robin hopping on a telephone wire. At least, I think it’s a robin. It could be an oriole or a towhee or God knows what other species. Does it matter?

Thoreau didn’t necessarily think so, and he knew his birds. Knowledge of the supposed robin can amplify the pleasure of viewing it, but it can also detract. An ornithologist may know the biological rationale for a peacock’s colorful plume but not appreciate its beauty. “I begin to see objects only when I leave off understanding them,” says Thoreau. Jaded eyes see little.

Thoreau cultivated an “innocence of the eye.” He never lost the child’s sense of wonder. He couldn’t pass a berry without picking it. “He is a boy and will be an old boy,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said of his friend. Like Socrates, Thoreau valued a thoroughly conscious ignorance and suggested, only half-joking, that he form a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance.

Humans have been creating beauty far longer than they’ve been explaining it. Homer knew nothing of literary theory. The unknown artists who adorned the caves of Lascaux some seventeen thousand years ago would flunk an art history class. Better to see beauty than understand it.

The mosquitoes have, thankfully, dispersed, and the ambitious runner is long gone. The bird, though, is still hopping on the wire, and shows no sign of tiring. Good for him, I think, but Walden Pond awaits. I decide to move on.

After a few steps, I stop myself. Why the rush? It’s my visual hypothesis mechanism at work. My brain posits that a creature—quite possibly a robin—is hopping on a telephone wire. In a fraction of a second, my brain accepts this supposition and files a report: Bird, probably a robin, doing something cute and birdlike. Yeah, nature. You’re a regular John Muir. Can we get going now?

I force myself to linger, as Thoreau did. “You must walk sometimes perfectly free—not prying nor inquisitive—not bent upon seeing things.” Thoreau could easily spend an hour watching a painted tortoise lay her eggs in moistened sand or a sail fluttering in the wind. He once spent an entire day watching a mother duck teach her ducklings about the river, later delighting children with his duck tales. But what children find wonderful, adults often find peculiar. A farmer named Murray recalls seeing Thoreau standing motionless, staring into a pond.

I stopped and looked at him and I says, “Da-a-vid Henry, what air you a-doin’?” And he didn’t turn his head and he didn’t look at me. He kept on lookin’ down at that pond, and he said, as if he was thinkin’ about the stars in the heavens, “Mr. Murray, I’m a-studying—the habits—of the bullfrog!” And there that darned fool had been standin’—the livelong day—a-studyin’—the habits—of the bull-frog!

It’s not easy to see slowly like Thoreau. Vision is the speediest sense, far faster than, say, taste. There is no visual equivalent of “savoring.” (We can say our eyes “lingered” on an object, but that lacks the sensuousness of “savor.”)

I am a lazy seer. I expect the subject of my gaze to do all the work. Dazzle me, scenery. Be beautiful, damn it! When the subject—be it the Alps or a Monet—inevitably falls short of my unreasonable expectations, I assign blame to it, not me. Thoreau thought otherwise. The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”

I reach a clearing in the woods: the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden. A wrought-iron fence encircles the spot, marked by a pile of stones. (The cabin itself is long gone.) An engraving informs me, “Beneath these stones lies the Chimney Foundation of Thoreau’s Cabin: 1845–1847.”

The site of history’s greatest experiment in voluntary solitude is, naturally, crowded: a woman clutching a large Starbucks cup and shouting into her cell phone, a group of Chinese tourists maneuvering their long camera lenses like artillery before snapping photos of the rocks. They’re messing with my solitude, with my Thoreauvian moment. I want them to leave, but they don’t.

That’s unfair, I know. They have as much a right to be here as I do. It’s like traffic. When we’re stuck in it, we gripe about “all this traffic,” ignoring the fact that we’re part of the traffic, part of the problem.

A middle-aged couple is staring at the stone markers. I can tell the man, in particular, is enthralled. He’s muttering something about how much he admires Thoreau.

“What are you going to do,” says his wife, teasing, “go live in the woods?”

The man, chastised, grows silent. No, he’s not going to live in the woods. He is going to steer the minivan home, unload the luggage, and resume his life of quiet desperation.

This is the problem with Thoreau. What he did was impractical. We can’t drop everything and live in the woods, not even with Mom’s home cooking nearby. We have bills to pay and recitals to attend and conference calls to join. Then again, Thoreau never suggested we do as he did. Walden was meant as a wake-up call, not a prescription.

I saunter a bit farther and spot another inscription. These words, from Walden, are perhaps Thoreau’s most famous: “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.”

I like it, but would make one small edit. I’d change “live” deliberately to “see” deliberately. I don’t think Thoreau would object. Seeing was the point of his experiment. All the rest—the solitude, the simplicity—were means to this end.

Thoreau saw too much. It exhausted him. “I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain,” he writes in his journal.

We think of our senses as antennae, scanning the environment and plucking information. They are more like filters, sifting through the jumble of noise for the few relevant signals, lest the flood of sensory data overwhelm us. We are built to, as Thoreau put it, receive “our portion of the infinite,” and not a drop more.

Seeing is deliberate. It’s always a choice, even if we don’t realize it. Proper seeing, says Thoreau, requires “a separate intention of the eye.” It’s all about the angles. No one played them better than Thoreau. Change your perspective and you change not only how you see but what you see. “From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”

Thoreau observes Walden Pond from every conceivable vantage point: from a hilltop, on its shores, a boat on its surface, and underwater. He viewed the same scene by daylight and moonlight, in winter and summer.

Thoreau rarely stared at anything directly. He looked with the side of his eye. There’s a physiological basis for this. In dim light, we can detect objects best by looking at them from the side. Thoreau may or may not have known that. He did know from experience.

Determined not to get stuck in a visual rut, he altered his perspective. Sometimes only the slightest shift, “a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine,” revealed new worlds. On a cold December day in 1855, Thoreau spotted a pine grosbeak, “unusually far south for the winter,” only because he had chosen a different path.

Sometimes he took more drastic steps. He’d bend over and peer through his legs, marveling at the inverted world. (Thoreau was big on inverting; he even flipped his name, changing it from David Henry to Henry David.) Turn the world upside down, and you see it anew.

I find a relatively secluded spot along the pond and, checking first to make sure no one is watching, try this maneuver myself. I bend over and peer between my legs. Sky and earth flip. Blood rushes to my head. I feel dizzy. I stand up straight, and sky and earth return to their proper positions. Maybe I’m not doing this properly.

No, I’m missing the point. Thoreau’s stellar vision wasn’t merely technique, a fun-pack of optical tricks. It was a function of character. He considered the perception of beauty “a moral test.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are. As the Vedas say, “What you see, you become.”

Leslie Wilson was right. Sure, it’s a fine pond, tree-lined and with water that glistens in the solstice light. But it is just a pond. Not necessarily the most peaceful, either. As I walk along the shoreline, I hear the rumble of a passing train, just as Thoreau did in his time. His life coincided with the rapid growth of the railroad. From his cabin, he could hear the whistle of the locomotive “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard.”

Thoreau was conflicted about this newfangled technology. On the one hand, the raw power of the locomotive awed him. Yet he feared the railroad disrupted familiar rhythms. Farmers who once gauged time by the sun now set their clocks to the 2:00 p.m. train from Boston. Walden Woods was stripped of trees, fuel for the wood-fired engines. “We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau concludes. “It rides upon us.”

I arrive at the Walden Pond Visitors Center, and find a to-scale replica of Thoreau’s cabin. It’s nicer than I imagined. A proper A-frame, with a woodstove, a desk, a trapdoor that leads to a root cellar, chairs (for visitors), a small but comfortable bed, and a large window with southern exposure. Not Versailles, but no dump, either.

A park ranger named Nick is leading a tour. It’s clearly not his first, but a genuine enthusiasm for Thoreau animates what might otherwise be a canned spiel. I’ve noticed this about Thoreauvians. There’s something about Henry (Thoreauvians always call him Henry) that discourages the sort of reflexive cynicism that typically accompanies excessive familiarity.

Nick wraps up his prepared remarks, then solicits questions. They come rapid-fire.

“How much did the cabin cost to build?”

“Twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents. The nails were the most expensive.”

“What did he do all day?”

“He read and he wrote.”

“Why did he do it?” asks one teenager, incredulous, as if Thoreau had embezzled millions or joined a dangerous cult instead of living in the woods for a couple of years.

“It was an experiment in simplicity,” says Nick the Ranger. “Plus, he was twenty-eight years old. He needed to get away from Mom and Dad.” The teenager, judging by his nodding head, clearly likes this answer.

Thoreau did live simply, growing some of his own food. He lived off the grid before there was a grid. The point, though, wasn’t simplicity for its own sake. Thoreau, student of the East, was undergoing a kind of purification. Cleansing his lens of perception.

French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote of the need to make ourselves “susceptible to knowing.” Thoreau, adrift at Walden, made himself susceptible to seeing. He knew we see best when unencumbered, when nothing comes between us and the light. Thoreau compared himself to a mathematician who, confronting a difficult problem, disembarrasses it of the extraneous and cuts to the heart of the equation.

Thoreau was superficial. I mean that in the best possible sense. The superficial gets a bum rap. It’s often used synonymously with “shallow,” but they are different. Shallow is a lack of depth. Superficial is depth diffused. Our portion of the infinite spread thin, but very wide.

“Why have we slandered the outward?” wondered Thoreau. “The perception of surfaces will have the effect of a miracle to the sane sense.” This explains why Thoreau didn’t stare. He glanced. His eyes alighted on various objects, first here, then there, like a bumblebee in search of pollen. A “sauntering of the eye,” he called it.

Humans glance for the same reason other animals sniff: it’s how we probe our surroundings. Glancing also reveals unexpected wonders. The words “surface” and “surprise” share a linguistic root.

Glancing is our natural state. Our eyes are rarely still, even when we think they are. They make rapid jumps, called saccades, pausing briefly in between. Our eyes typically move at least three times per second: roughly 100,000 times per day.

The glance is helpful. It comes in handy when cooking a three-course meal, or flying an airplane. A number of years ago, I earned my private pilot’s license. I’ve forgotten much from those days, but one technique stuck with me: the instrument scan.

“Don’t stare!” my instructor barked. “Scan!”

Altimeter. Airspeed indicator. Artificial horizon. Rest the eyes on each for a second or two, then move on. Keep your eyes, and your attention, moving. Pilots get into trouble when they fixate on one instrument. Stare at the altimeter and your heading drifts. Focus on heading and your airspeed strays. Scan, scan, scan. It’s a valuable lesson. We see more by scanning than staring.

I resume my walk along Walden Pond’s sandy shoreline. Signs warn of steep drop-offs and hazardous swimming conditions. Walden isn’t the perfect pond, but something need not be perfect, or even functional, to be beautiful. Thoreau regularly saw beauty in nature’s imperfections. Gazing at Walden on a calm September afternoon, he notices the water is perfectly smooth save for a few motes speckling the surface. While others might see blemishes, Thoreau saw something “pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.” In Walden, he describes encountering a horse carcass rotting near his cabin, and finding it not repulsive but oddly reassuring. Beautiful, even. Nature’s wisdom at work.

I’ve been thinking about Thoreau’s admonition to find my own Walden. I didn’t care for the real Walden. Too many mosquitoes and tourists. Not enough air-conditioning, or coffee. Yes, my own Walden. But where?

The next day, I put that question to Jeff Cramer, curator of collections at the Walden Woods Project. A fit man, with shaved head and neatly trimmed beard, Jeff was a late convert to Thoreau. He was working at the Boston Public Library in a comfortable job when he picked up and moved to Concord.

Jeff has earned his Thoreauvian cred. I trust him. I like him, too, especially when he reveals his favorite Thoreau quote (this from a man who edited The Quotable Thoreau). “If I am not I, who will be?”

I want to be I, really I do, but a better, less melancholy I. A Thoreauvian I, with Thoreauvian eyes. I want to learn how to see and where. For me, a place person, the two are inseparable. How is where. Where is how.

“Let’s see,” says Jeff. “You could cross over the North Bridge and cut through the woods on the left and…”

“Woods? As in trees and bugs?”

“Well, yes.”

“Any other suggestions?”

“You could go to the South River Bridge and rent a canoe.”

“Canoe, as in boat?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Any other suggestions?”

“Sleepy Hollow is very peaceful.”

“You mean the cemetery?”

“Yes.”

“What else have you got?”

“Let’s see. You could go to Starbucks.”

“I’m listening.”

“And take Walden and maybe some pages from his journal, and observe.”

“Starbucks? Really?”

“Yes. It’s Thoreau’s words that matter. He was inspired by all this land around us. It helped make Thoreau who he was, but it won’t make you who you are.”

I like this idea. Back in Thoreau’s time, Concord also had a coffee shop, and Thoreau was a regular. Besides, if Thoreau’s wisdom is portable, as all true wisdom is, then surely it’s just as useful sipping an overpriced beverage as it is roughing it in the woods. The heck with Walden. I’m going to Starbucks.

I wake early and pack a Thoreau kit—Walden, his essay “Walking,” a collection of letters to a spiritual seeker named William Blake, selections from his journal. (I’m nearly finished.) I saunter to Concord’s one Starbucks.

It is appropriately Concordian, the lighting a bit softer than most, the furniture a bit more refined. It is still a Starbucks, though, the way Walden is still a pond.

I order a simple coffee, plop down in a big leather chair, and crack open Henry. “Beauty is where it is perceived,” he tells me. Even here, in Starbucks? I look around but find no beauty. My reflex is to blame my surroundings, my Walden.

I catch myself. Don’t be so passive. If you don’t see beauty, create some. Use your imagination. Heighten your senses.

This works, but, again, the wrong sense responds. My acoustic reflex kicks in, and I hear beauty everywhere: the gentle hum of an air conditioner, the musical clink of ice cubes, giggling baristas, beeping cash registers, the singsong call of “Venti Green Iced Tea!” and, off in the distance, sirens.

I take Thoreau’s advice—“all faculties in repose but the one you are using”—and focus exclusively on the visual. Sure enough, I see. I see a young father, sunglasses perched on forehead, muscular arms swinging, cradling his infant son. At the milk and sugar station, I notice how people dance with one another. One step forward, one step back. Excuse me, oh, I’m sorry, pardon my reach, no, pardon mine. I notice how people wait for their order from varying distances. Some crowd the barista, while others give her space. Some people stand still, while others fidget.

Scan, scan, scan. I see the muscular dad again. He’s placed his son on a table and is rocking him back and forth. I wonder if that is wise. Scan. A girls’ softball team, in uniforms of blue, white, and orange, high-fiving their coach. Scan. The man next to me, reading Montaigne. He sees I’m reading Thoreau, and nods approval, discreetly, of course. Concord is the Quiet Car of New England.

Minutes, then hours pass. The muscular dad leaves. So does the softball team, and the man reading Montaigne. Yet I’m still here, glancing. I deploy other Thoreauvian techniques. I change my position, standing by the door for a while, sauntering over to the coffee bar, cocking my head sideways. I consider inverting my head between my legs but decide against it. Even here, in Thoreauville, that is going too far.

Hours later, the man who was reading Montaigne returns. He spots me in the same chair, with the same books, and says, “You’ve been here entirely too long.”

“Actually,” I say, looking up, with fresh eyes, “not nearly long enough.”

It’s true. I need more time. While I see more clearly here, in my own private Walden, I do not have a visual epiphany, the “single expansion” Thoreau achieved. I am disappointed, but take solace in the words of—who else?—Henry David Thoreau. Seeing requires not only time but distance, he tells me. “You cannot see anything until you are clear of it.”