Weeding or Writing: On “Henry at Work”
Jonathan Van Belle and John Kaag | Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living | Princeton University Press | June 2023 | 232 Pages
The summer before my senior year of college, I spent a month farming in France. I found an organization that connected me with organic farmers offering room and board in exchange for my unskilled labor. “Farming as LARP,” a friend of mine calls it—referring to the live-action role-playing games that let one inhabit an experience that might be otherwise unavailable: pirates at sea; dragons on the prowl. In my case, we were provincial villagers at the foot of the Alps, planting courgettes and peeling les oignons verts.
Officially, my goal was to practice the language. This seemed suitable, since, having spent very little time cultivating any living thing except myself, I had no idea how I’d feel about four weeks of it. If I hated farming, at least I’d hate it in French. In fact, I wasn’t particularly drawn to farming itself: I didn’t have any “back-to-nature” fantasies, dreams of living off the land, or aspirations to transform my city through urban gardening. What I did have was conversational French, writerly ambitions, and a month before my summer job started.
I knew better than to idealize the trip before I went; still, to do so would have been easy: summer in the French countryside! Meeting the people and connecting to the land! Learning the French words for plants I couldn’t even name in English! Once I arrived, I found an endless stream of details to add to the list. A six-year-old neighbor with flowing hair and bare feet, traipsing through the creek and skipping stones with me; rolling hills and wooded paths that I ran at sunset, shaking out my work-sore muscles; wine and raclette in the late June twilight. It felt idyllic when I described it to myself this way. But it often felt lonely, too. By myself with the tomatoes; by myself with the compost; by myself with a rake in an open field.
It wasn’t escapism because I hadn’t escaped: there were still hundreds of potato leaves waiting for me to check them for bugs; endless rows of carrots to distinguish from weeds that looked like carrots. The loneliness came through more clearly then, on my knees in the caked dirt, thinking of Mrs. Dalloway “musing among the vegetables.” But it helped to imagine the story I was in. I used my weeding as an opportunity for dramatic narrative. Oh fausse carotte, I whispered, relishing the guttural Rs, you may be clever. But I am the protector of carrots, and none may stand against me! Occasionally I weeded an actual carrot by mistake, an exciting moment that required a quick pivot from the narrator. Oh pale root, plucked untimely from the earth! What sacrifice, for the sake of your fellows!
We woke up early one morning to plant betraves, the sun just rising behind the greenhouse. A phrase floated through my head as we worked: “Things are coming together for me in a way they never have before.” I didn’t know what I meant by it, exactly, but it seemed like a narrative I could try to inhabit: this is the morning I plant beets and feel things coming together for me. There was a mist across the fields, and the sky was pale with early morning. It reminded me of a fairytale I could half-remember, something Norwegian about dwarves who forge gold and run from the dawn. The dew made the soil damp and easy to pierce.
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In July 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved from the town of Concord to the nearby woods, where, enamored by the idea of living off the land, he felled a patch of pine trees, built a small cabin, and planted seven miles’ worth of beans. This attempt at self-sufficiency required extensive labor—particularly regarding the beans, to which Thoreau devoted countless hours: hoeing, weeding, and of course writing about the small plants, which, given the dearth of human company, count as some of Walden’s leading characters. “I came to love my rows, my beans,” he writes in a chapter on “The Bean-Field”: “They attached me to the earth.”
Thoreau is best known as a naturalist, partly on the strength of his account of those two years in the woods. But as significant as the natural world is for Thoreau, he gives extensive attention to another topic as well: the philosophy of work. After all, Walden is at least as much about the moral-spiritual benefits of manual labor as it is a call for immersion in the wildness of nature. In Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle bring our attention to an oft-overlooked side of the famed thinker: “Thoreau the worker.”
Henry at Work draws on the Walden years, of course, but also on the many other jobs by which Thoreau supported himself throughout his life. His family, though middle class, was not wealthy, and Thoreau made a living where he could. He learned carpentry when he was young; he worked as a surveyor, classroom teacher, and stonemason; he helped care for his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children while Emerson was lecturing abroad. All the while, he continued to write and reflect on the value of work itself. “Thoreau questioned why we work,” Kaag and van Belle write. “In this way, Thoreau made philosophy practical, even urgent.”
Henry at Work considers Thoreau’s philosophy of work along a variety of dimensions: manual work and meaningless work; compensation and coworkers. Each chapter explicates Thoreau’s theoretical ideas alongside examples from contemporary workers, the authors’ experience, and Thoreau’s own life. Like professors who have assigned Thoreau to skeptical undergrads—Kaag may have had his UMass students in mind—the authors aim to demonstrate the relevance of the nineteenth-century writer’s ideas to our work lives 169 years later.
The connection isn’t a stretch. Thoreau’s central thesis sounds distinctly contemporary: he calls us to seek out work infused with meaning. Adamantly anti-drudgery, he resists rote, purposeless activities. Work ought to allow us to express our full humanity, not reduce us to automatons; our daily employment should invite our full agency and close attention. Thoreau wasn’t above difficult labor, but he wanted such labor to achieve the worker’s ends, not an employer’s. His writings challenge us to take pride in our work, and to choose work worth our pride. “Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully,” he writes in Walden, “that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. . . . Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.”
Henry At Work’s present-day examples draw on a range of professions, using Thoreau’s philosophy of work as a lens on their experiences: we hear from a high-powered CEO, the baker at a tiny corner store, a swindling jeweler. This use of anecdote evokes Studs Terkel’s 1974 classic book Working, an oral history documenting workers’ experiences at the daily grind. Unlike Terkel’s detailed sociology, though, Henry at Work summarizes its case studies in a few sentences, a paragraph or two at most. This keeps things moving, but it also means that many of the complexities of contemporary working life get lost. For instance, the authors interview a shopkeeper named Gloria, who wakes up before sunrise every day to serve coffee to her small-town customers. “The job, at first glance, might look like sheer drudgery, but Gloria, very clearly, is growing at Ferns.” But deeper questions go unasked. Would more education have helped her find a job with less drudgery? How much financial stability does she have? To what extent is Gloria making the best of a challenging situation—and are there ways to change the situation itself?
If we want to repair our relationship to work, surely we need to ask: what created that relationship in the first place? Karl Marx, Thoreau’s contemporary, asks this question. But despite their shared interest in modern work, Thoreau probably hadn’t read Marx’s writing, and Henry at Work follows suit: Marx is mentioned only in passing. But Thoreau’s shortcomings thereby become the book’s own. “We shouldn’t forget the labor of the heart that makes the work worthwhile,” the authors write. But is forgetfulness the issue? Or do we face an intricate tangle of forces that separate us from work that would feel like it matters?
After all, Thoreau’s tenets are not themselves so controversial: most of us would prefer meaningful work to drudgery. But things get interesting the moment we try to put those tenets into practice. Laudable aims collide with other laudable aims. The fulfilling job is not always the steady one, and even the most mind-numbing work might also offer a sense of competence and self-sufficiency. Kaag and van Belle are right to draw on real-life examples, and not only because it makes their text more engaging: real life is where we see the stakes of Thoreau’s theory. Case studies provide a crucial testing ground. What happens when you pursue meaningful work, or fail to? In Henry at Work, those case studies hint at a deeper layer of complexity: social and economic forces that complicate any choice of career. But the authors stop just short of exploring the difficult trade-offs that their subjects face—and this is where we need them most. The real task, for a philosophy of work, is to grapple with competing claims: balancing responsibility to one’s self, one’s family, one’s human community, one’s planet.
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I had a year left until graduation, and no career path had yet presented itself to me. I loved philosophy, but after thinking for so many years, it felt important to try doing something. Indeed, this seemed to be a necessity if I wanted an income.
My classmates interested in business and finance had taken summer internships that funneled them into full-time positions after graduation. My friends aiming for graduate school had found research funding for lab work or archive trips. Meanwhile, I was dragging a hoe down rows of hardened earth, writing cover letters and resumé lines only in my head. “As a farm intern in France this summer, I strategized ways to make repetitive tasks more efficient,” I thought. I experimented with a backward walk rather than a sideways one and was pleased to find that it improved matters. “The hoeing techniques I developed doubled my team’s efficiency.”
But even if I were to successfully spin my farming experience to impress a corporate hiring manager, I knew I still had a deeper question to figure out. Given the rapidly warming climate, the violence caused by pervasive racism and sexism, the school districts struggling to make an impact—could I justify work that did anything other than pursue direct change? If my area of philosophy had been political discourse, or scientific ethics, the link might have felt easier to make. But I studied aesthetics, and arguments about the social value of artworks or reading as a path to empathy always seemed to miss the point. Art did something much harder to pin down, I felt, and I struggled to reconcile twin convictions: first, that the world needed every pair of hands to contribute to its repair. And second, that paying attention to the world was a task of deep significance, and that art somehow shaped the kind of attention we paid and therefore demanded attention of its own. Where was the line between interpreting the world and changing it?
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Kaag and van Belle focus on explicating Thoreau’s philosophy, not interrogating it. But, at key moments, they do go beyond Thoreau’s own thinking. For instance, the authors describe the Black inhabitants of Walden, unmentioned in Thoreau’s text, who accomplished feats of self-sufficiency similar to Thoreau’s “without fanfare for next to nothing.” In describing Thoreau’s dislike of restrictive schedules, Kaag and van Belle recognize that Thoreau was able to forgo hourly work only because “of his general station in life as a solidly middle-class Harvard graduate.” They read his condemnation of clocking in not only as an individual mandate but as a societal injunction “to pull down a system that forces billions of people into a race against the clock, a race that they were never meant to win.”
But it’s not clear that Thoreau himself actually supported such societal transformation. His focus on the individual meant that, despite advocating new ways of working and thinking, he didn’t say much about structural change. The historian and lawyer Staughton Lynd, in his 1968 book Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, offers a blistering critique of Thoreau’s individualism:
Innocent of the nature of power, ignorant of the realities of social change, and indifferent at times to the spectacle of human suffering, the American poet chose to interpret the world rather than to change it, to renounce the evils of industrialism rather than to help abolish them or bring them under control.
More recently, Ariel Dorfman critiques Thoreau’s description of a Massachusetts shipwreck, reframing Thoreau’s attention to natural forces as a blindness to human ones:
He ascribed the fate of those corpses to the workings of Nature, avoiding any mention of the ‘visible vibration in the fabric of society’ that led those families to flee their homeland. He does not address (either here or elsewhere in his work) the famine that drove so many starving inhabitants of Ireland to emigrate, a famine that was man-made and not at all due to ‘the law of Nature.’
Kaag and van Belle are committed to rehabilitating Thoreau for a wary audience. But their most valuable contribution comes not from extrapolating what “Thoreau would say” about contemporary problems, but in showing where his ideas can lead us when paired with a more robust sense of class consciousness and a stronger drive for action.
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My farming experience held close parallels to Thoreau’s own. Like his, my agrarianism was entirely unnecessary. Like him, I supplemented my farm-grown meals with store-bought goods. And, like him, I could leave when I felt like it. After four weeks, I flew home to Chicago for an air-conditioned summer job teaching Algebra II to precocious middle schoolers. Like Mrs. Dalloway’s friend Peter Walsh, I preferred men to cauliflowers, in the end.
Thoreau and I went farming in search of an experience: to know what it was like; to encounter its attendant thoughts and feelings. Of course, for most farmers, farming is anything but the pursuit of experience. It aims for output: you are trying to grow something. Thoreau and I were not entirely indifferent to this. He wanted his beans to prosper. I liked to gaze lovingly at the beet sprouts in the greenhouse. But nothing really depended on it, for either of us.
I would have disputed this at the time. If so much can depend upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain, why not on a slender beet sprout beside the white onions? But, really, it wasn’t the beet sprout that so much depended on: it was the poem, quietly offering a way to look at the world. Without it, I was lonely and awake too early. With it, I was hopeful that even these seedlings might yet become literary fodder. I mounded dirt around my beet sprouts and imagined the way I might write about the landscape: the grey mist rising over the leafy potato plants; the dark, loamy soil.
I felt less alone, finding words for what I saw. My private descriptions were a reminder, perhaps, that I might someday describe the scene for other people, that they might see alongside me. Or perhaps my sentences were a way of collecting value from the experience, evidence that the loneliness had served some purpose after all—producing not just lettuce, which someone else might have grown, but also ideas, which had come from me.
Thoreau assures us he was not at all lonely at Walden—“I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond”—and, in any case, he regularly dined at his mother’s house. But writing is essential to him, too. It’s implicit in every activity he describes: he built a house, observed the wildlife, tended the garden—and then wrote about it. He spent much of his time in the woods at his desk, and the rest of the experience served as material.
In fact, I’m not sure either of us was interested in having the experience unless we could write about it. Thoreau wanted to grow beans. But he really wanted to write about growing beans. “Who knows but if men…provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed?” he writes in Walden. Farming matters to Thoreau as an occasion to think about farming. Given everything else that he wants us to do without, it’s striking that this is what remains. In his stripped-down, simplified life, what Thoreau actually values is philosophy.
Saying so would have made that philosophy more compelling. Thoreau often sounds as if he wants us to learn to appreciate obligatory tasks through renewed attentiveness. He romanticizes the hard labor that, though voluntary for him, goes forced upon so many. But if Thoreau had recognized that thinking is what really matters to him, he might have centered a crucial truth: reflection is a vital component of our work lives. People should have the space for thinking, and the education to develop it, and the choice to pursue it in productive ways.
This is the real urgency of Thoreau’s philosophy: not the command to break free from a nine-to-five, not the injunction to idealize menial tasks, but a call to thoughtfulness about it all. What does my work feel like? In what ways does it matter, and how do I balance it against everything else that matters? What would it take for me to pursue meaningful work? And how can I clear the structural roadblocks that stand in the way—for myself and others?
This is why Kaag and van Belle’s book succeeds. Even without taking fully into account the many forces that shape our choice of work, the approachability of their prose—and the topic itself—virtually guarantee that readers will bring their own experiences to mind. In their chapter on coworkers, for instance, the authors write that our fellow employees “can make any job, no matter how lucrative or cushy, a living hell.” As much as we might wish for a more detailed exploration of a specific co-working relationship, the provocation is an immediate conversation starter. After all, we are forever irritated and irritating. The book prompts us to think philosophically about everyday occurrences, the many layers of feeling at play in our working lives, and the factors we weigh in deciding how to respond to them.
Ultimately, Henry at Work offers what Thoreau at his best would have valued most: an occasion for reflection.