Not Afraid of the Dark

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Narration: Michael McGowan, Violin: Kristin McGowan

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I have recently been reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and I have found myself returning again and again to the strange and searching presence of the man who went into the woods. Thoreau is often remembered as a philosopher of simplicity, a naturalist, or one of the great voices of American transcendentalism. But reading Walden, I have been struck by something deeper. Thoreau seems, above all, to be a seeker. He is searching for a better way to live, for truth, for peace, and, in his own way, for God.

In 1845, Thoreau went to the woods beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. He built a small cabin and lived there for a little over two years, hoping to strip life down to what was essential and discover what might be found when the noise of ordinary life was quieted. But Walden is much more than a manual for simple living. The deeper we go into the book, the more the woods become a place of revelation. Thoreau watches the seasons change, listens to the birds, observes the ice forming and melting on the pond, considers the lives of his neighbors, and speaks with the people who come down his path. He notices things most of us would walk past without seeing. Gradually, the natural world seems to become transparent. The pond is no longer simply a pond, and the woods are no longer simply woods. They seem to point toward something beyond themselves.

There is a revealing passage in the chapter “Solitude” that captures something of Thoreau's attitude toward both darkness and religion. Describing the quiet nights at Walden, he writes, “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.” It is a wonderfully Thoreauvian sentence: funny, provocative, and just a little unsettling. The witches have been hanged, Christianity has arrived, and candles have illuminated the darkness—yet human beings are still afraid. What, then, have all our supposed advances really accomplished? Thoreau seems to suggest that the deepest fears of the human heart cannot be dispelled simply by civilization, technology, or even religious convention.

And then, almost as if to demonstrate what he means, Walden gives us one of its strangest encounters.

Among the people who visit Thoreau at his cabin is an “old settler and original proprietor” of the land around Walden Pond. Thoreau speaks of him almost casually, as he does of the other visitors who come down his path. He is simply another man who has lived on this land, another neighbor with stories to tell. And yet there is something unusual about those stories.

Thoreau says that this old settler “told me of old time and of new eternity.” He seems to belong to the landscape in a way that the other visitors do not, as though he carries with him a memory of Walden that reaches back beyond ordinary history.

Elsewhere in the book, Thoreau tells a story associated with this same tradition. When the settler first came to the place, he is said to have used a divining rod to find water. A thin vapor rose from the earth, the hazel rod pointed steadily downward, and he concluded that there was water beneath the ground. He dug, and found it.

On one level, this is simply a piece of local folklore. Thoreau was fascinated by the stories and character of the people around Concord, and he records many such details in Walden. There is no need to turn the old settler into something he was not.

But Thoreau's choice of words is striking. This is the “original proprietor,” a man associated with the beginnings of the place itself, telling stories of “old time” and “new eternity.” He knows the land, and beneath the land he finds hidden water. His story seems to reach backward into the history of Walden while, at the same time, pointing toward something beyond history.

And notice how Thoreau tells it. He does not stop to explain whether the divining rod really worked. He does not tell us whether the old man's stories should be believed. He does not turn the encounter into a lesson. He simply allows the strange story to remain strange. That, to me, is what makes the passage so compelling.

The man appears in the book almost like an ordinary visitor to Thoreau's cabin, and yet his presence seems to blur the boundary between the ordinary and the mysterious. He is a man of the earth, digging into the ground and finding water, but he also speaks of eternity. The physical landscape and the unseen world seem to touch in his story.

Perhaps Thoreau himself sensed something of this. Perhaps, sitting in his little cabin, he recognized that the people who came to see him were part of the same mystery he had come into the woods to encounter. The pond, the trees, the animals, the changing seasons, the people of Concord, their memories and their stories—all of them belonged to the same world. And perhaps that world was deeper than it first appeared.

Thoreau does not tell us that the old settler was a messenger from another world. He does not need to. He simply leaves the mystery where he found it.

And perhaps that is one of the things I love most about Walden. The extraordinary is allowed to sit quietly beside the ordinary. A man tells stories of eternity; a divining rod points toward hidden water; the seasons change; the pond freezes; the birds sing. Somehow, all of it belongs in the same world.

Perhaps that is the real significance of the earlier passage about darkness. Thoreau is not afraid of entering the dark. He seems almost eager to discover what might be found there. He does not need to illuminate every mystery with a candle, explain it away with a doctrine, or dismiss it because it cannot be easily understood. He can simply sit beside it and pay attention. And perhaps that is what makes him such a compelling seeker.

This is what makes Thoreau feel less like a writer merely describing nature and more like a man searching for what lies behind it. His spiritual vision is not easily placed within conventional Christianity. He was influenced by Christianity, Eastern religious writings, classical philosophy, transcendentalism, and the natural world around him, and he does not give us a neat theology. What he gives us instead is a hunger.

He seems to believe that the world is more than it appears to be. Nature can awaken something within us. Solitude can strip away distractions. Silence can make us attentive. Beauty can become a summons. The search outward becomes a search inward, and the woods become a place where Thoreau can listen closely enough to discover what is happening within his own soul.

There is a wonderful paradox here. The farther Thoreau withdraws from society, the more deeply he encounters other people. Visitors come to his cabin. He talks with farmers, laborers, children, and travelers. He listens to their stories, including stories that seem impossible. Even in solitude, he remains part of the human community. The woods do not separate him from life; they teach him how to see it.

Thoreau once wrote, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” The sentence seems almost to summarize his entire vision. Heaven is not necessarily somewhere remote, beyond the stars. The possibility of encountering something divine is already beneath us—in the earth, the water, the woods, the ordinary places through which we walk every day.

Perhaps this is why Walden has felt so spiritual to me. Thoreau does not seem satisfied with appearances. He wants to know what is real. He wants to understand what is worth pursuing. He looks at creation and refuses to believe that it is empty.

There is a kind of faith in that.

At first, it might seem strange to bring Henry David Thoreau into a story about Ireland. He was an American; Walden Pond was in Massachusetts; his cabin stood among the woods of New England. And yet, as I read Walden, I kept thinking about Ireland.

Ireland has its own ancient habit of seeing landscape as something more than landscape. A holy well is more than a spring. An island is more than an island. A mountain can become a place of pilgrimage. A stone can carry memory. A ruined monastery can remain a place of prayer long after the monks have gone.

Across the Irish landscape, the physical and spiritual worlds have often seemed to meet. Long before Christianity came to Ireland, particular places had acquired meaning and reverence. Christianity did not simply erase this sense of sacred landscape. In many places, it deepened it, giving ancient places new stories and new prayers. The landscape became a keeper of memory.

Perhaps this is why Thoreau's way of looking at nature feels unexpectedly familiar from an Irish perspective. He does not merely ask what a place is. He asks what it might mean. He looks at a pond and sees mystery. He looks at the woods and sees something capable of awakening the soul. He pays attention to the world as though it might be speaking.

And then there is William Butler Yeats.

Yeats read Thoreau when he was young, and the American writer left a lasting impression on him. The connection is not merely something literary scholars have noticed after the fact. Yeats himself remembered it. Looking back on his youth, he wrote that he had “the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree,” the little island in Lough Gill.

Eventually, that dream became one of the most beloved poems in the English language: The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

The connection between the two writers is remarkably clear. Thoreau goes to Walden Pond and imagines a simple life in a cabin surrounded by nature. Yeats dreams of going to Innisfree and building a small cabin of his own. Thoreau plants beans; Yeats imagines his nine bean rows. Thoreau keeps bees; Yeats imagines a hive for honeybees. Thoreau seeks quiet; Yeats hears the peace of the island calling him.

The resemblance is not accidental. Yeats tells us so himself. But Yeats does not simply imitate Thoreau. He brings Thoreau home to Ireland.

There is something almost magical about The Lake Isle of Innisfree because Yeats did not actually live the life he describes there. The poem was composed while he was living in London and missing Ireland. He later recalled walking through Fleet Street when he heard the sound of water from a shop-window fountain. The sound suddenly brought back the lake water of Lough Gill, and from that memory came the poem.

He imagines building his little cabin there, growing beans and keeping bees. He imagines standing beneath the night sky and hearing the water touching the shore. But the poem ultimately becomes about something deeper than a physical journey. Yeats writes:

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.”

It sounds like an escape, but by the end of the poem we discover that Innisfree has already become part of him. He hears the lake water in the “deep heart's core.”

The island is no longer merely somewhere he wants to go. It is somewhere he carries within him.

Here, perhaps, Yeats moves beyond Thoreau. Thoreau goes to the woods in order to discover what life might become when he strips away its distractions. Yeats discovers that the place he longs for has already entered his imagination and his soul. Walden becomes Innisfree. An American pond becomes an Irish island. A cabin in the Massachusetts woods becomes a cabin beside Lough Gill. Thoreau's beans become Yeats's nine bean rows, and a young American experiment in simple living becomes, through Yeats, an Irish poem about longing, memory, and peace.

But perhaps there is an even deeper connection.

Neither man is really looking for an escape from reality. They are looking for a recovery of reality.

The world around them has become noisy, distracted, and spiritually opaque. They want to see again. They want to hear again. They want to recover the ability to experience the world as something alive with meaning.

For Thoreau, that means going to Walden.

For Yeats, it means remembering Innisfree.

There is something else happening here, too. Yeats's Innisfree is not simply a beautiful place. It is a place of inward transformation. He does not want the island merely because it is quiet. He wants it because he believes that there he might become different: “I shall have some peace there.”

The same thing Thoreau seems to seek at Walden. The same thing so many people have sought in Ireland's sacred places for centuries.

We go somewhere quiet because we hope that the quiet will change us. We climb a mountain, visit a holy well, walk along an empty shore, sit beside a lake, or enter an old church. Sometimes, in those places, something happens—not necessarily something dramatic, but perhaps something as simple as becoming attentive again. We notice the wind, the water, the light, the sound of birds, the presence of another person, and finally our own thoughts. And perhaps, beneath all of these things, we become aware of the One who made them.

That is where Thoreau's search becomes especially interesting to me. He does not always speak the language of faith that a Christian might use, but he possesses something that precedes theology: wonder. He looks at creation and refuses to believe that it is empty.

And Yeats, in his own way, would spend a lifetime asking the same question: what lies behind the visible world?

Perhaps this is why Thoreau and Yeats still speak to us. Neither man was content simply to accept the world as it appeared. Both were seekers. Thoreau searched through the woods of Concord; Yeats searched through the landscape and imagination of Ireland. Both sensed that the visible world might contain hints of something invisible, and both understood that finding it required a certain kind of attention.

For Yeats, that search would become a defining pursuit of his life. He was fascinated not only by the natural world but by what might lie beyond it. Irish mythology and folklore, spiritualism, visions, dreams, occult traditions, and the mysteries of human consciousness all became part of his attempt to understand the unseen. His involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was part of this larger spiritual and intellectual quest. He was not simply interested in ghosts or supernatural stories for their own sake. He wanted to know whether there was, in fact, a reality beyond the visible world—and whether human beings could somehow perceive it.

Seen in that light, his early encounter with Thoreau takes on an even greater significance.

The young Yeats who dreamed of going to Innisfree “in imitation of Thoreau” was already beginning a journey that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Thoreau had gone into the woods and discovered a world that seemed charged with mystery. Yeats would spend his life looking for that mystery in the landscape, mythology, poetry, and spiritual imagination of Ireland.

Perhaps the modern world makes this kind of searching especially difficult. We live surrounded by noise—screens, notifications, traffic, commerce, and endless information. We are constantly being asked to look at something else. Thoreau's great invitation is almost the opposite: slow down, look, listen, pay attention. The world is here. And perhaps God is here, too.

It is remarkable to think that a young Irish poet, reading the works of an American naturalist, could carry an image of Walden across the Atlantic and transform it into Innisfree. But perhaps the connection is not so surprising after all. Both men were searching for a quiet place. Both believed that nature could awaken the soul. Both were drawn toward solitude, simplicity, and beauty. Both sensed that the ordinary world might conceal something extraordinary.

And both discovered, in different ways, that the place they were seeking was not simply a location on a map. It was a way of seeing.

Perhaps that is what Thoreau understood when he went into the woods. He had not gone there simply to escape the world. He had gone there to see the world more clearly.

And perhaps that is what Yeats discovered at Innisfree. The island he longed to reach had already found its home within him. The lake was already sounding in his deep heart's core.

Perhaps this is the invitation that both men leave us: to slow down, to become attentive, and to look again at the world around us—a lake, a field, a mountain, an old stone, a tree, a quiet road. Places we might ordinarily pass without a second thought.

Because perhaps the world is more full of God than we realize. Perhaps creation is not silent. Perhaps the landscape is speaking.

And perhaps being not afraid of the dark means something more than simply having courage in the face of fear. Perhaps it means being willing to enter the mystery—to admit that we do not understand everything, to remain attentive when the familiar world suddenly becomes strange, and to wonder whether the darkness contains not emptiness, but a presence we have not yet learned to see.

Thoreau went into the woods. Yeats listened for the lake. Neither was afraid to look into the darkness and wonder what might be there. Perhaps that is why their voices still reach us.

Perhaps the world is more full of God than we realize. Perhaps creation is not silent.

Perhaps the landscape is speaking. And, if we become quiet enough to listen, we may discover that the darkness is not empty at all.