Transcendental Experience, Walden Pond 2009

To demand someone have a transcendental experience seems inherently ironic and misguided: an assignment requiring one to conform to the expectations, conventions, and demands produced by others, rather than experiencing a place on one’s own accord.

I include my 9th grade writing not out of bitter contempt towards the teacher whose sole comments were that I failed to follow the prompt, but rather, because I find it strikingly similar to my current struggle to connect Thoreau’s theory and writing into my own practice. I continue to grapple with what it means “to live deliberately” and “front only the essential facts of life,” uncertain whether some attainable authenticity exists, and to what degree in practice I can separate myself from my own cultural foundations that shape the lens through which I view even the most natural isolated spaces. Is it problematic that I often crave the trivial routines that Thoreau so vehemently disdains - am I a slave capitulating to industrial capitalist culture for feeling at home in the chaos of the city?

In my 9th grade passage I express my frustration in feeling unable to escape the cultural gaze through which I viewed the place of Walden pond, hindered by what felt like invasions of culture in a space I then romanticized to be a pure paragon of nature. As my senior fall semester progresses, I am ceaselessly mesmerized by the panoramic high peak tableau outside my window, eager to understand how this dichotomy of nature and culture (which I don’t believe to be as starkly black and white as Thoreau) continues to influence my perception of and experience in this place. What felt unattainable when forced to produce meaning I now venture to explore deliberately on my own. 

Below is verbatim a written assignment of mine from 9th grade in response to the prompt “Describe a transcendental experience at Walden Pond.” 

(It is ridden with high school angst)

Rachael Wilkin

Transcendental Experience, Walden Pond 2009

Between the crowds of students blasting music on their static filled iPod speakers, the thick wire fence that lined the pathway we were told strictly not to veer off of, and, perhaps the most disturbing, the pieces of trash that scattered on the edges of the trail, Walden certainty did not live up to my romanticized expectations. It seemed that which Thoreau explicitly escaped from was present throughout my experience of the place. Despite seeking a solitary moment of contemplation, I was bombarded by distractions of the industrialized city from which I had come.

The foliage was breathtaking, certainly, and was a refreshingly different view from my apartment window. But the pond surprisingly appeared invasively affected by contemporary urban influences. Along the trail, the fence along the path manifested as a physical obstacle, restricting visitors form making their own connection to nature, the opposite of what Thoreau sought by coming to Walden. Although the reflection of the trees on the crystal clear water and the vivid colors of the leaves were truly unforgettable, the image of the wired railing cutting this idyllic picture in half remains most prevalent in my mind.

And perhaps the pedestal I had put Walden pond on was so enormously romanticized that the contemporary reality of it was impossible to compare to that which was experienced and made meaningful by Thoreau. When the opportunity to observe it in a comparable manner was proposed, the feelings I had while walking around the place lacked the meaningful conclusions I felt required to produce: how does one comprehend the bigness and meaning of nature and the fundamental facts of life in 30 minutes? I so desperately wanted to have an epiphany about how human beings should be more like beans – perhaps I couldn’t find meaning fast enough, or perhaps the pressure itself of coming to a meaningful conclusion about the place was enough to distract me  from paying attention to what might have been authentically experienced.

Instead of focusing on the magnificence of the pond, the trash and fence-restricted pathways made me think about how places constantly transform: that even a place so incredible as Walden Pond has been corrupted by modern day influences like garbage, and even people - people who were so inconsiderate of the atmosphere around them that instead of admiring the beautiful scenery, they opted to blast music and talk so loudly that they invaded and seemed to disturb not only there experience of others, but the essence of Walden pond itself.