Thus begins the entry in Henry Thoreau’s Jour­nal for July 5, 1845. Since March of that year, Thoreau had been build­ing a cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emer­son had bought the pre­vi­ous year. (RWE paid $8.10/acre for eleven acres of pas­ture and $125.00 for three or four acres of adja­cent woods.) Thoreau had bor­rowed an axe and cut down a few of the white pines from Emerson’s wood­lot to frame his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin. In May, some friends had come out from Con­cord and helped him raise the struc­ture. He used the boards from a shack he’d pur­chased for roof and siding. “It is dif­fi­cult to begin with­out borrowing,” Thoreau tells us, with absolute accu­racy, in Walden.

We know the rest of the story: for two years and two months, Thoreau lived in his Walden cabin to get back to the root of things:

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.

What few people real­ize, how­ever, is the extent to which Thoreau’s jour­ney out to Walden Pond was tied up with his own for­tunes and fail­ures as a pro­fes­sional writer.

The issues that con­front the modern city and its dwellers—from the policy of san­i­ta­tion and traf­fic con­ges­tion to the soci­ol­ogy of migra­tion pat­terns to the pop phi­los­o­phy of how do we cope crammed box upon box in par­al­lel rhythms with mil­lions of others, the major­ity of whom we will never meet—are myriad. But just remind­ing us that city life can be stress­ful seems like an anachro­nis­tic and waste­ful use of the dwin­dling space afforded print journalists.

If you don’t want to slog through Jonah Lehrer’s latest spe­cial to the Boston Globe, I’ll spoil it for you:  visit nature once in a while. Lehrer, pop psy­chol­o­gist ordi­naire, draws the claim from a series of recent stud­ies that because expe­ri­enc­ing an urban world requires acute and cease­less mental work to sort out all the stim­uli invad­ing the flaneur’s senses, the resul­tant stress can cause actual psy­cho­log­i­cal damage.

Lehrer’s solu­tion is, like so many urban mal­con­tents, a call for the return to Nature.  That’s Nature with a cap­i­tal N.  Prob­lem is, we’re not quite sure what he means each time he intones the word. At times, he seems very much the natur­ist in the mold of Thoreau, the thinly veiled source for his depic­tion of the idyl­lic New Eng­land landscape:

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Happy hol­i­days to every­one out there!

I’ll be offline until Jan­u­ary 7 or so, but check back anyway, as there’s a good chance my new com­rades will keep things hop­ping here in the interim. For now, I leave you–and espe­cially my friends trapped in the frozen Mid­west–with this, some advice of ques­tion­able merit from Thoreau’s jour­nal, writ­ten on Christ­mas Day, 1856:

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spir­its up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Mael­strom of Amer­i­can Mod­ernism won a 2007 Ban­croft Prize. Also well worth your time are Richardson’s Emer­son: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.