The passage also speaks to Balthrop-Lewis’s delight in what she has discovered through her careful and generous attention to the writings of this man who lived by a pond, and of her desire to share it so that we – our lives together and our relationship with this ailing but still astonishing world – might be transformed. Indeed, turning directly to her reader, she says as much. ‘I hope this book can help you remember’ that ‘delight is a fund for power’.

Most Australian readers probably come to Thoreau relatively untroubled by the iconic role he plays in the United States: an archetype of unflinching individualism; patron saint of reverence for ‘Nature’; or originator of the idea of civil disobedience that inspired Martin Luther King Jr. Nevertheless, nearly 170 years after the publication of Walden (1854), any reading of Thoreau is inevitably refracted through the interpretations that comprise the vast body of commentary. A bold and passionate thinker, Balthrop-Lewis is hardly shy when it comes to disagreeing with past readings or insisting that Thoreau’s politics, his love for the more-than-human world, and his religion are best understood when considered synthetically. Nevertheless, eschewing any notion of a true reading from nowhere, she willingly offers one that is attentive both to his world and to ours.

Of the many dimensions of his work that resonate with this historical moment, I concentrate here on one: his expansive notion of society.

One of the inherited pictures of Thoreau that the author wishes to dispel is that of a man abjuring society. Her goal, though, is not to negate this belief through contrary evidence, but rather, in the spirit of Thoreau’s approach, to have us question the premises on which it is based: in this case, a definition that has society comprise solely other humans (and then only some of them) and only the living.

The inhabitants among whom Thoreau finds society include not only living creatures other than humans, but a fluid and animated world that defies the classifications and cuts we habitually impose upon it: rain and frog, wind and birds, flowers and sounds, seasons and light through ice. Perhaps even more strikingly, he characterises his relationships with them using the language customarily refused such beings. They offer friendship, sympathy, and company, and he looks to them when he seeks to work out the meaning of a good life. Of the form of time conducive to living well, he writes that, while his fellow townsmen might judge life lived outside in days and weeks, and minced into hours as ‘sheer idleness’, had ‘birds and flowers tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting’.

Nor, in a way that reminded me of Annie Dillard’s writing, does he limit society to those on this side of the dividing line between the living and the dead. As Dillard has written, ‘Like me, they were alive at the moment.’ Searching out their stories and visiting the remnants of the homes they had made, he finds company in the no longer living inhabitants of Walden Woods, most of whom were formerly enslaved Black people. Here, Balthrop-Lewis touches upon one of the most damning criticisms of the cast of white naturalists among whom Thoreau has sometimes been placed: that they portrayed an ideal of nature cleansed of humans, apart from the white settler colonisers who nominate themselves as the ones fit to preserve its ostensibly unsullied state. In the Australian context, as Indigenous writers from Marcia Langton to Evelyn Araluen have pointed out, this variety of naturalism, and its inflection in environmentalism, involves a double erasure: first, of the Indigenous peoples who lived within those lands right up until they were violently evicted; second, that Indigenous peoples played an active role in creating and maintaining what we take to be ‘nature’.

In the United States, there was a third erasure – of the Black people who forged lives outside the grid of a civilisation that compelled them first into chattel slavery, and then into conditions of exploitative, unfree labour. Following their example of living in a world outside those structures, Thoreau’s turn to nature was also, Balthrop-Lewis helps us see, a political act, a refusal to benefit from (white) privileges forged from unjust (Black) labour.

Balthrop-Lewis emphasises the political implications of Thoreau’s individual actions because they help is with a political question. How, in the face of structures of injustice and ecological violence that exceed the reach of any one life, do I, do you, live justly, resist violence, and awaken others to forms of collective action that correlate with our responsibility to the world and to the possibility of delight amid its myriad beings?