The Eternal Quest

Published: Sep 4, 2007

On July 10, 1984, Sylvia and I spent the night in Concord, Mass., in an inn once owned by a grandfather of Henry David Thoreau. On our way out the next morning, we stopped at Walden Pond as the sun was rising. Since reading Thoreau's book, "Walden," I had wanted to see the place where he spent two years living "deliberately." At Walden he peered through the lens of morning dew drops to see his singular vision:

I went to the woods because I wished to live

deliberately, to front only the essential facts

of life, and to see if I could not learn what

it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,

discover that I had not lived.

The cool, damp, half-mile hike halfway around the lake led us finally to the house site. Walden was entirely different from my mental image of it - as a Floridian, I expected a small Florida lake surrounded by grassy, flat land. At Walden the earth rises as high as 50 feet above a lake that lies like a half-filled pan stretching out about a mile and curving to the northwest. The entire area huddles snugly in the shade of tall trees that grow as they please. Though we saw no one else, we did not feel alone.

The house site was not on the hilltop as I expected but on a slope. According to the markers, the house did not face the lake directly, but instead looked at it out of the corner of its eye. The water level is probably 30 feet lower than the spot where the house stood and at a distance of 50 yards or so.

I could not imagine Thoreau's garden on that slope in the hard, pebbly, shaded soil. Growing vegetables required the determination and labor we associate with early New Englanders. Walden was truly a labor of love. Love of an ideal: To learn what it takes to live off the land with only minimal help from civilization, and by being part of nature, to learn the value of living.

Thoreau said he could reach New York faster by walking than by rail. Walking, he would progress toward his destination from the first moment, all the while enjoying the countryside and conversation with those he met along the way. Laboring for train fare, he would be bent to a task all the harder because it diverted him from the joy of the journey.

Thoreau's act seems simple: to live in harmony with the pond, the land, his soul. He built the least house that would serve his needs. After planting his garden so he could eat, he had time to walk, read, write, think, sleep, dream. There is no monument. The memory of Thoreau is monument enough.

The one-hour drive from Providence to Newport threaded us through neighborhoods and strip malls decorated by an endless string of traffic lights. With traffic pushing against us, we finally reached the center of Newport, where tourists strolled in and out of shops and spilled out onto the narrow streets. We searched for the area where the wealthy built their summer houses at the turn of the century. Sylvia wanted to see the cliff walk, a belt that wraps around the fat peninsula to keep the mansions from tumbling into the ocean.

The size and beauty of The Breakers surprised me. Vanderbilt had it built in the 1890s. Its 70 rooms, including a dining room with a 45-foot-high ceiling and 12 rose alabaster columns, express gilded age excess. The majestic imitation of a 16th century Genoese palace dominates an expansive grassy slope that slides down and finally yields to the Atlantic Ocean along a rocky beach where green-draped stones rise from the water like gems adorning the ocean's skirts. I wondered if Vanderbilt might have had the stones placed there to enhance the view.

Through the iron fence along the walk, I jokingly asked a small child if she lived there. She shrugged her shoulders and her mother said, "Doesn't she wish."

Within four hours we had experienced not two house sites or two homes but two worlds. But they were oddly alike: each expressed its builder's desire to discover the fruits of a full life. Each world expressed not truth itself but a path to that truth. Each led me to the question whether it is better to strip life of all encumbrances that lead us into "… lives of quiet desperation," or to gather all the material and artistic products of human achievement in one place and revel in them. Thus each man conducted his search and exploration in the presence of the grandest thing he could imagine. Within that grandeur each felt the pulse of his solitary life surging past.

Vanderbilt's palace impressed me with the wealth one man could accumulate. It was magnificent, one of America's great houses. But it did not stir my primal instincts, as did Thoreau's words sifted through the forest around Walden Pond.

Did Vanderbilt's estate attract more attention than Walden because there was more to see? Perhaps, but in Walden, Thoreau held up a mirror to show us what our distant ancestors faced. In so doing, he exposed the true human wealth that accrues when one fronts "the essential facts of life." For that reason, Thoreau's monument seemed grander than Vanderbilt's.

At four o'clock we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and entered the Garden State Parkway. Within an hour we were driving through semi-commercial, rural countryside until we found a motel in Hightstown, 10 miles from Princeton. A man with an Indian accent greeted and registered us. Then we drove to the university past lovely countryside and several research institutes. On campus we found the Frick Chemical Laboratory, parked, and went in. In every university I visit, the chemistry department feels like home with its familiar smells and sights. This one has spawned some of America's most brilliant research and scholarship. We peered into laboratories and lecture halls and explored the library on the second floor.

Walking out of the Frick Laboratory, we crossed the street in search of the chapel, another campus landmark. The sun still hung over the trees as we walked into the chapel to absorb the transformation of sunlight into colored images as it filtered itself through the stained glass windows.

After a while, we walked, chatting and strolling through campus like two magnets drawing to ourselves specks of that great institution. Though it was our first visit, we felt at home.

Bathed in the sounds and visions of that moment, I saw the unity of the day's wanderings: Questions and the search for answers, not answers themselves, form the essence of education. Each person formulates his own questions in his own way and crafts his own education.

But mankind long ago discovered that the most important questions remain forever unanswered. To be sure, those questions are not forgotten; mankind has created universities to keep them alive. There, young men and women live briefly in intimate contact with them in a world of cultured, gentle beauty limited not by campus walls, but the edges of the human mind.

Though Thoreau's house no longer stands, his memory lives throughout this land. He asked an important question that will not be soon forgotten. Vanderbilt's question was the mirror image of Thoreau's. Out of the center of this great campus rises a stone reminder of the greatest single question. That reminder must be sturdy to sustain the question through dry times.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went

there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several

more lives to live, and could not spare any more time

for that one.

The young people we saw milling about the university would soon leave to seek their own answers. The search so bewitches some that we remain to live out our lives near the questions.

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Jack E. Fernandez is chemistry professor emeritus on the University of South Florida and author of "Cafe Con Leche," a novel about Ybor City from the Great Depression to the Castro Revolution.