The profound resonance of Acton’s two revolutions

Acton was the birthplace of not one revolution but two: the Revolutionary War of 1775 and, in the early to mid-1800s, the emergence of Transcendentalism — a philosophical, spiritual, and literary movement that emphasized individualism and the inherent goodness of humanity and nature. 

The Transcendentalists rejected the conventions of organized religion and instead advocated for a personal connection with nature and the divine. Members of this second revolution included such people as Ralph Waldo Emerson (essayist), Henry David Thoreau (naturalist, essayist, and philosopher), Bronson Alcott (philosopher), and Margaret Fuller (journalist and editor). Other foundational writers of this period included, of course, Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Almost all of these people were Concordians. 

There were connections between the two revolutions. Ralph Waldo was the grandson of the Rev. William Emerson, who was Acton’s minister at the time of the American Revolution and who fired up his parishioners after each insult by the British Parliament. Another connection: Reverend Emerson built the Old Manse, where both Ralph Waldo and Hawthorne lived.

The wonder of Walden 

One Transcendentalist, Thoreau, continues to reverberate in my life. Some days, but not often enough, I manage to pry myself loose from the rush and heave of the world and take a quiet walk around Walden Pond. In autumn, the air is crisp and sharp; in summer soft and aromatic. In winter, the woods stand stiffly, silent and white, and the pond is sometimes frozen over. All I can hear is the crunching of my boots in the snow. In the spring, ducks swim in the pond. I listen to the calls of the blackbirds and chickadees and kingfishers. 

For the few minutes of my walk, I have time to reflect. I have time to think about who I am, what is important to me, and where I am going in my life. 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” wrote Thoreau. “Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.” Thoreau was also worried by the increasing speed of life brought about by new technologies. In Thoreau’s day, that was the railroad. “We do not ride the railroad,” he wrote, “the railroad rides us.” 

Too fast, too furious

Today, we are galloping further and further away from Thoreau’s insights and the ideas of the Transcendentalists. The pace of life has gotten faster and faster, driven by the internet and the increasing speed of communication, robbing us of time for quiet reflection. In the mid-19th century, the fastest speed of communication was the telegraph, at three bits per second; in the early 1980s, the first internet, at 1,000 bits per second; today 100,000,000 bits per second and more.

Often, we have only mediated contact with nature, seen with the cameras of our smartphones and other devices. We lead frantic lives, looking at our phones every five minutes, checking off items on our to-do lists, rarely taking the time for quiet walks in the woods. The world today is not only faster. It is more scheduled, more fragmented, less patient, louder, more wired, more public — all antithetical to the ideals of the Transcendentalists. 

What have we lost?  If we no longer have time to let our minds wander and roam without particular purpose, what have we lost? If we and our children no longer have time to play? If we no longer experience the quality of slowness, or a digestible rate of information, or silence, or privacy?

Rest, reflect, revitalize

For one, I believe that we have threatened our creativity. I believe we have diminished the needed time for our minds to replenish themselves. And more subtly, but perhaps most importantly, I believe we have lost something of our inner selves. My inner self is that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom, just as vital as our political freedom from Britain two and a half centuries ago. My inner self roots me to me, and to the ground beneath me. The sunlight and soil that nourish my inner self are solitude and personal reflection and slowness. These are all aspects of living embraced by the Acton Transcendentalists.

And so, at this time that we celebrate the first revolution, which began in our beloved town of Acton, we should also reflect on the second. We should try to slow down our lives. We should experience nature and people directly and not through our mechanisms. And we should honor and nourish our inner selves.

Alan Lightman, a member of the Acton Bridge board, is a former physicist, writer, and professor at MIT.