`We Crave Only Reality'

Thoreau’s is the most moving of deaths, for its dignity and stoical acceptance of the inevitable. His death was the final affirmation of his life. The man misunderstood by generations of readers as a hermit died at home, in bed, tended by his sister Sophia and visited by friends and neighbors. Sam Staples, who famously jailed Thoreau for one night in 1846, said he had never seen a man “dying with so much pleasure and peace.” When his Aunt Louisa asked whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.” On the morning of May 6, 1862, Sophia read him a passage from the “Thursday” section of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and he looked forward to the homeward trip in the “Friday” section, saying, “Now comes good sailing.” In his final utterance, only “moose” and “Indian” could be understood. In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Robert D. Richardson Jr. writes:

“No more satisfying deathbed utterance can be imagined for Thoreau than his reply to a question put gently to him by Parker Pillsbury a few days before his death. Pillsbury was an old abolitionist warhorse, a former minister who had left his church over the slavery issue, a man of principle and proven courage, an old family friend who, like [Harrison Gray Otis] Blake and Aunt Louisa, could not resist the impulse to peer into the future. `You seem so near the brink of the dark river,’ Pillsbury said, `that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.’ Thoreau’s answer summed up life. `One world at a time,’ he said.

“Henry Thoreau died at nine in the morning on May 6, 1862. Outdoors, where he could no longer see them, the earliest apple trees began to leaf and show green, just as they do every year on this day.”

Richardson’s treatment of Thoreau’s death is beautifully sensitive and nuanced, as is his rendering of Emerson’s death in Emerson: The Mind on Fire. He shows us what Thoreau meant when he wrote in Walden:

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”