It’s important to note that his isolation was not the sheltering-in-place kind. It was not enforced (unless you consider life-style decisions made by a driven personality and deeply principled thinker to be beyond free choice). And his apartness was far from total. He went into Concord several times a week to catch up on gossip and have dinner with his relatives. At Walden, he entertained guests and enjoyed regular chats with Irish laborers who worked on a railroad line close to the pond.

At the same time, social distancing came naturally to him. He was, or could be, an irritable and thin-skinned guy, someone for whom the human species was a problem. (“I do not value any view of the universe into which man and institutions of man enter very largely,” he wrote.) When he was in a misanthropic mood, six to eight feet of separation wasn’t nearly enough. Try a mile and a half, which was the approximate distance from Walden to the center of town.

But if the Walden cabin, about the size of a garden shed, was in some sense a retreat, a refuge from “the noise of my contemporaries,” it had many more positive functions: it was a studio, a laboratory, an observatory, and a watchtower. Reading “Walden” — or, better, his more lucidly written journals — as I have done these last weeks, we sense that Thoreau viewed the Walden outpost less as a defensive necessity than as a place of opportunity where he could do what he could not easily do in the everyday world: namely, concentrate, focus, which I’ve always suspected was a way for him to handle incipient anxiety and despondency.