[W]hen Sheila Post first read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” in high school, she found the ode to simple living “resonated and profoundly affected me.” That’s why she assigned the book when she went on to teach American literature and New England studies at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
“I wanted urban students to appreciate they could have their Waldens,” she recalls.
But as much as Post expressed enthusiasm for the work during class picnics at the site of Thoreau’s inspiration — Walden Pond in nearby Concord — she learned many young readers aren’t hungry for an old-school text published a century and a half ago.
“Thoreau crafted ‘Walden’ very carefully as a chronicle of the developing consciousness,” she says, “but after a decade of teaching, I discovered many people start it but don’t finish.”
And so Post decided “to write about Thoreau’s motives, but in a contemporary narrative.” Her new novel, “The Road to Walden North” from Vermont’s Green Writers Press, tells the story of a current-day college professor struggling to introduce students to “Walden” — and learning for herself its true, timeless meaning.
“There’s no point, really, in trying to apply Thoreau’s philosophy to modern life,” one student character comments in the book’s early pages, “much less trying to live as he lived.”
The novel’s protagonist, a teacher with Irish roots like Post, tries her best to defend Thoreau, going so far as traveling to a fictional Northeast Kingdom town named Walden North, where she encounters a man practicing what she’s preaching.
“Ready to ‘walk the walk,’ are you, then?” he asks.
“No, my job is to ‘talk the talk,’” she replies.
“Spoken like a true academic,” he says. “You are intrigued by the idea of something, but not its reality.”
When Thoreau decided to “live life simply” in a 10-by-15-foot cabin for two years, two months and two days starting July 4, 1845, he wasn’t seeking education as much as experience.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
Post, in turn, frames her novel with the same chapter titles as in “Walden,” all while unfolding a present-day plot in which her characters read or cite many of Thoreau’s words.
“Perhaps you recall the last chapter of ‘Walden’ where Thoreau urges his readers to ‘be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,’” the Vermont man tells the teacher. “What better place to ‘explore thyself’ than a simple cabin in the middle of a forest, along a pristine pond?”
“Do you know the book by heart?” she asks.
“I live it by heart,” he replies.
So does the author. Post stresses her work, while based on fact, is fiction. But she confirms, just like its lead character, she understands the journey of a professor who trades the talk for the walk. As Kirkus Reviews notes in its assessment of “a subtle novel that’s a glowing testament to the enduring power of ideas”: “Post’s characters are well-drawn, although it quickly becomes obvious where her own allegiances lie; after all, she’s a former teacher who lives in a New England setting not unlike Walden North.”
Leaving Boston and her teaching position, Post moved to Vermont, where she wrote “The Road to Walden North” and a second new Green Writers Press title, the Ireland-based novel “Your Own Ones.” Now living in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, she’s working on a third book.
Post is set to appear Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore, where her 332-page hardcover is stocked beside such best sellers as “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
“There’s a movement yet again of people trying to simplify their lives,” the author says. “Thoreau was quite visionary. His themes are as applicable today as they were in his day.”
