There has been plenty of advice on what to turn to during the C-19 pandemic. Next to the usual reminders - stay fit, eat healthily and drink less alcohol - almost every major newspaper also carried at least one feature article on what to read during the current lockdown. Recommendations ranged from the classics of imaginary travel - Swift’s Gulliver and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe figured prominently - to modern novels and authors such as Camus’s The Plague and the latest attempt to capture the historical dimensions of doom and gloom such as in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light.
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and his Journals are among the few non-fiction titles on these ‘must read’ lists. However, being non-fiction texts, Thoreau’s reflections have been regarded mainly as contributions to a largely de-politicised ‘mindfulness’: enough for triggering perhaps a few weeks of personal meditation during the lockdown but hardly containing a radical political message that goes beyond individualised ponderings. In short, Walden and the Journals had been turned into neutral texts that are of no political or social consequence whatsoever.
The critical and provocative sting has been taken out. What we read instead from one renowned American paper is a Thoreau who has gone into the woods mainly to meditate on the meanings of life after having experienced the sudden loss of his beloved brother from sepsis a few months earlier (this is how the Washington Post’s correspondent sees Walden). Obviously this is supposed to appeal to those whose relatives and friends had died in the pandemic.
