It is, of course, an arbitrary beginning — or ending — this “new year,” though it lies close enough to winter solstice to gain a little credibility. Janus, Roman god of doorways oversees it, lends his name to the month at hand; Janus needs two heads to accomplish his work of looking both back and ahead, figuring transitions. So, it’s complicated. And here, as ’21 closes and ’22 commences, that seems understatement.

Still, the land — often seen through a window at this time of year — awaits. Going out to it, to conserved woods and fields, to trails, is a choice, of course; to me it feels like choosing daily to be reborn.

Which puts me in mind of how I see and understand those woods, fields and trails, how I learn them and how I talk about them. And that brings to the fore a complementary form of walking — reading, a sort of finger-walking through worded terrain.

At the center of my life with lands, both real and written, walks Henry Thoreau. EB White once wrote that each of us finds a “lifetime book,” a volume that is at the core of who we are and to which we return with a homing instinct. “Every [one], I think, reads one book in [a] life, and this one is mine,” he wrote of Walden in a 1953 New Yorker piece. “It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest.” White owned and gave away tens of editions of Walden, including a 1964 edition (complete with a rain-shedding duraflex cover) to which he wrote the introduction.

I arrived at the same life-book some decades after White, but my life has been no less inflected by it. In his writing, Thoreau points to an ideal of having four hours devoted each day to walking. As with all ideals, his practice fell short at times, but he remained dedicated to it, even as his “walking” could include standing for long minutes immersed in a swamp up to his nostrils so he could know better what a swamp was. Or inching out on his belly over fresh pond-ice “for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant.” Just so, I’ve found.

If one accepts White’s proposal, a question follows: how do you know when you’ve picked up and read your life-book? For me, the answer arrived slowly. My first reading of Walden was hardly a reading at all. Assigned the book in a high school English class, I turned dutifully to it that evening and fell promptly asleep. The pattern continued through the three weeks we considered sections of the book, and there was also an alarming transference to class time, where my chronic head-bobbing intensified, lowering my teacher’s already low estimation of me. I missed entirely Thoreau’s discontent with the sort of schooling I was sleeping through, and I missed his affection for the outdoor world where I felt truly animated. My first meeting with Henry Thoreau was akin to passing someone on the street.

Jump to college and a reading with a touch more adhesive. I got – mostly by listening to lectures – some of Thoreau’s central critique of his (and, by extension, my) world, and I noted that the places he went for insight and wisdom were, like mine, wooded and hilly. All good, but not exactly a scrivmance.

Then there was the long, oblique approach to my life’s work, teaching. By the time I landed in an English Department some 20 years along, I knew quite a bit about teaching and writing and a lot about being outside, but I’d not returned to Walden, though as a journal editor, I’d received any number of pieces to which it was important. Then, a year or two into my English career, my department chair said, “So here we are in Concord, Massachusetts, and, since Phil retired, no one’s been teaching Walden. You spend too much time in the woods. How about you?”

Of such questions long affection is born. I arrived at my life-book late, but after 25 years of readings, teachings, and any number of epiphanies, major and minor, I’m still turning its pages, still awake to its possibilities.

Like Janus, Henry Thoreau helps me see both backward and forward, and he also helps me know the land over time. Like walking the land daily, rereading Henry Thoreau brings me a sort of rebirth. So I keep Walden handy. I wish you the discovery of, or the ongoing return to, a life-book in 2022.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com

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