Author Archives: Hollin Attendola

Earlier this month, Dermot Kennedy (a new-to-me artist whose music I’ve been enjoying) released an album called The Weight of the Woods. I’ve had the titular song and its reprise on repeat quite a few times since then.  

If I should fall down / under stars I can’t call out / get me back to my homeground / let me add to the weight of the woods // Tether my bones tight / in view of that coastline / and bury this soul of mine / give it back to the weight of the woods.  

An ever-increasing amount of years ago, like all good English Literature students, I was assigned to read Walden; or, a Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau as part of my American Literature studies. Something in those pages caught to the quick of me. And it wasn’t just the cabin he built for 28 (19^th century) dollars. Home ownership! Imagine! (Though he did not own the land).  

Anyways, “The Weight of the Woods” reminded me of Walden, as did the advent of spring, as did the itch of having no dirt under my fingernails. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” indeed.  

I would imagine (or would like to believe, or even hope) that nearly every educated person  recognizes the name Walden and understands, at least in broad strokes, the themes associated with it: nature, simplicity, contemplation, and living deliberately. Most ought to recognize the iconic, oft-quoted line, oft-plastered-on-outdoor-outlet-store-walls, “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”  (Chapter 2: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For).  

Walden is, however, to my reading, more than a rote lesson. In fact, I think Thoreau himself would be remiss if his work was used as blueprint or gospel;  

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different person in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead (Chapter 1: Economy).  

I suspect that it is not purely an interest in diversity of life and observation that guides Thoreau to this conclusion, but rather a self-preserved reflex of we surely cannot all live in the woods and crowd that space — he remarks in Chapter 6, Visitors, that “These are the folks that worry the man / That lives in the house that I built. I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers rather.” The use of the word “worry” in this instance refers to its meaning of “irritate.” This vexation is primarily caused by the “self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all” and not the “honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake.”  

But the cut of what Thoreau cautions against is living a life uncontemplated, of following in another’s path just because the way already-tread is always easier than the uncharted path. Life is about simplicity, not ease; though Walden argues that simplicity eases the toils required to live. Don’t go off to live in the woods because you can’t think of anything else you’d rather do – go off to live in the woods because you think that there is nothing else that you can do, no other way that you can live. It’s true that Thoreau’s Walden experience only lasted a little over two years. It’s true that he was not the first or only to live in those Walden woods. But he did it, didn’t he?  

During my first reading of Walden — more than a decade ago now — my favorite chapter was Chapter 9: The Ponds. I was struck by Thoreau’s description of the pond. How could one not fall in love with such a place? It seems perfection; it seems ideal; it seems heavenly – ah, but Thoreau chides, “Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.”  

During this reading, it was Chapter 7: The Bean-Field that was dearest to me. There is something worthwhile and necessary in the soil, something worthwhile and necessary in the work of one’s hands, something necessary and worthwhile in birdsong and the woodchuck and the weeds. And how true it still rings today that, “ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely.” 

Anyways, let me add to the weight of the woods and the beanfield – let me add some measure of my soul back to the work that I do, deliberately, turning the good earth in my hands wherever I can.