None of the above. Not a bum and not ordinary. The Thoreau family home was a boarding house, and Henry paid room and board like other residents. Rather than being a bum, he enriched the family. He invented a machine that refined graphite powder. For a limited time, the relatively poor Thoreaus had a monopoly on refined graphite powder, needed in electrotyping, and they lived well. Sophia wore crinolines.
The graphite business as well as the pencil business was conducted in secret. After his father's death, Thoreau opperated the business, including purchase of raw graphite, contract grinding, refining, filling orders and shipping. Thoreau researched and developed tools and methods for making pencils, and visitors who might have disclosed these trade secrets were not allowed access to the so-called "pencil factory," a shed on the back of the boarding house.
The Thoreaus were secretive about everything, and Henry followed the family tradition. The play of concealment and disclosure is (IMO) the reason for the extraordinary power of Walden. It is difficult to convey how odd and exceptional the Thoreaus were:
Except for Henry's father, none of the Thoreaus married.
Henry was a practicing nudist.
Henry had a collection of homoerotic literature.
Thanks to an English admirer, at the time of his death Henry had the largest collection of Hindu literature in America.
Henry was remarkably well read in English and Chinese literature. Nearly invisible allusions to this literature texture Walden.
Henry, like his uncle Charles Dunbar, was narcoleptic. At times he would appear cataleptic.
After the death of his brother from lockjaw, Henry psychosomatically developed the symptoms of lockjaw.
Also like his uncle, Henry had extraordinary physical and acrobatic ability. While walking beside a yoke of oxen, Uncle Charlie could change sides by leaping over the oxen. Thoreau could gracefully leaped his mother's dinningroom table. Both could do balancing acts impossible for the average person.
Henry's vegetarian diet (IMO) contributed to his early death from tuberculosis. A low-protein diet worsens tuberculosis.
His excessive dependence on corn may have given him pellagra.
He lost all of his teeth by age 34.
A crucial event during the Walden residence was that Henry was kicked by a horse, IMO permanantly injurying his spleen and causing periods of weakness throughout the rest of his life.
The list is endless, but I'll stop here: Thoreau is the most hated man in America, blamed for the hippies and other excesses of individualism. No literature about Thoreau is to be trusted without inspection, including the biased Wikipedia article.
Tom
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) the eighteen chapters of Walden parallel the first eighteen hexagrams of King Wen's sequence. There are also textual allusions, but I have yet to prove that Thoreau held a copy of the I Ching in his hands. I'm working on it. Anyway, my apparent discovery renewed my interest in Walden, and I began to see the depth I had originally missed, thanks in part to the Yahoo Waldenlist group.
So much ignorance, so much misinformation. L
