“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-Reliance.”
Thoreau’s two years, two months, and two days at Walden Pond are, to this day, critiqued for not being out in the real wilderness, truly away from society. But that was never the point of his experiment.
He was well aware that his single-room cabin on the northern shore of a pond popular for woodcutting and recreation was only a few miles from town. “I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some,” Thoreau wrote in Walden.
From his chairs—“one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”–to his walks into town “to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there,” Thoreau makes it clear that complete withdrawal from society was never his aim.
The test of whether he could live simply and deliberately never required total escape.
Neither did Emerson believe that solitude required permanent withdrawal from the world. He knew that complete isolation was neither realistic nor desirable, especially if it meant losing meaningful friendships.
Instead, Emerson argues that the harder task is learning to maintain some of the interior tranquility that wells up in solitude while living amid the world's noise and demands.
It's easy to sit beside a quiet pond and reflect on what matters and where to place your attention. It's much more difficult to carry that sense of peace into traffic jams, performative workplaces, the hurried aisles of grocery stores (I'm looking at you, Trader Joe's), or dinner table conversations with people who might not share your beliefs.
That struggle, Emerson observed, is where you lose yourself.
“The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force,” he wrote.
I'm as guilty as anyone of rehearsing conversations and arguments while alone, only to watch my stance slowly crumble when I'm finally sitting across from another person or group.
Learning to distinguish your own ideals from the ones you inherit from the crowd is difficult at best, and perhaps a lifelong task. The key, Emerson suggests, is not to become bitter or resentful, but to maintain that inward independence with “perfect sweetness” while still participating in the life around you.
The real test of personal integrity isn't solitary, then. It's social.
Going out into the wilderness and abandoning society altogether may, in some ways, be easier than returning to ordinary life without losing yourself. But total solitude can become its own kind of conformity—a retreat so complete that it narrows a life more than it expands it.