When we think of Henry David Thoreau, we think of him at Walden. Indeed, readers might be forgiven for imagining that he passed his entire adult life there, planting beans and bouncing pebbles off the frozen surface of the pond. But, in fact, Thoreau spent little more than two years in the cabin. The rest of the time, he lived as a paying customer at his family’s boarding house in Concord, Massachusetts. Yes, he sang the praises of perpetual motion. (“Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” he once wrote.) Yet he largely stuck to his burrow, with one notable exception: a protracted pajama party, in two distinct chapters, at the home of his great friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau first joined the Emerson household in April of 1841. At that point, Emerson was dallying with communitarian ideals, and doubtless found the idea of a house guest more palatable than carting manure at the nearby utopian compound of Brook Farm. Also, Emerson adored his young friend. He viewed Thoreau as a disciple, factotum, personal healer. “I work with him as I should not without him,” Emerson informed his brother William, adding that the newest member of the house was “a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree.”
At the outset, of course, Thoreau was very much the junior partner in the relationship. Emerson was already an established writer and theological maverick, having published “Nature” (1836) and ditched his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church. Thoreau was a recent college graduate who had washed out as a schoolteacher. Fourteen years younger than his host, he did his best to walk like Emerson and talk like Emerson—a feat of mimicry that the poet James Russell Lowell described as “exquisitely amusing.” This was hero worship on steroids, with a strong filial twist.
It was also something more than that. Shortly before taking a brief trip with his idol, Thoreau wrote in his journal, “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe.” This sense of friendship as a spiritual undertaking, a fusion of kindred souls, flowed in both directions. So did the capacity to bring joy and, ultimately, inflict pain. You could say that the story of Thoreau and Emerson was a love story. It was complicated, however, by Thoreau’s growing attachment to his mentor’s wife.