ABSTRACT
No man’s hired scrivener, Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden to prove that while farming may indeed be, as Jefferson propounded, a sacred occupation, still faith and hope can thrive wherever there is Joy rising up from the organic sense. Even if your brother has died the painful death of lockjaw. The argument—too complex to be rehearsed here—involves the reading of a strategic arrangement of chapters: by the change of seasons, obviously, but also by a process of withdrawal, which one might call “alonification,” and then of resubmersion into the cycle of organic life, involving the discovery that if winter can be indeed a kind of summer and that, if so, spring must figure as an amazing gratuity, like finding heaven after a life itself well lived. In other words, living through winter to get to summer is, like enduring life in the hope of an afterlife, an insult to the creation, in fact a sort of blasphemy.
