Like most Americans of the last 150 years whose interests include writing, literature, nature, the environment, philosophy and the plethora of customs, laws, ideologies, hopes and fears loosely holding together American society, Henry David Thoreau has been a constant presence in my life. That does not imply detailed knowledge, extensive study or emulation, but, rather, a trustworthy influence in the lifelong process of exploring “…the capabilities of this world.”

At his funeral in 1862 (he died at 44 from tuberculosis) his friend, mentor, patron, employer and admirer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said of Thoreau, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.… His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

And so he has. Still, Thoreau has always inspired critics both vile and legitimate, picking apart the man and his work’s human contradictions and imperfections until organic knowledge, virtue and beauty are reduced to a sterilized, manageable order fitting the critic’s preconceptions of tidiness, hierarchy and decree. He was in his time and continues to be a thorn in the ass of proper, conformist, mainstream, capitalist society and a mirror to the intolerance and narrowness of convention smothering creativity. Emerson, a well-known and beloved American man of letters and philosopher, allowed Thoreau to build a small cabin on some land he owned on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He had two purposes in moving to Walden: write his first book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” and experiment with reversing the Puritan ethic and Yankee habit of working six days a week and resting one. Instead of following the Puritan model, Thoreau worked one day a week at various jobs and spent the others six searching for answers to the questions he asked, “Who are we? Where are we?”

As he wrote in Walden, “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 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, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

He was never entirely forgiven by some for living deliberately and for his true account of what he learned and experienced of the essential facts of life. One of them is among my favorite Thoreau quotes: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”