Nor is it at all fair to say, as Schulz does, that “Thoreau never understood that life itself is not consistent—that what worked for a well-off Harvard-educated man without dependents or obligations might not make an ideal universal code.” In “Resistance to Civil Government,” he underscores and wrestles with precisely that difference. A number of his abolitionist neighbors, he writes, are afraid to transgress for fear of “the consequences to their property and family.” He sympathizes with them so fully he imagines himself in their place: “[I]f I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard.” Yes, it is, and Thoreau does not shy from the difficulty.

And he himself is difficult. To my mind the better question to ask about Thoreau isn’t why we love him, because most of us don’t. Most of us ignore him, and a large number of those who pay him any mind seem to loathe him, or find him ridiculous. At the high school where I once taught American literature, Walden is no longer on the syllabus, nor is Gatsby, for that matter, and although the sample-size is unscientific, as best I can recall, not one of the adolescent New Yorkers I forced Walden on cottoned to it. The better question, or at least the harder one for me, is why it is that ever since his untimely death in 1862 we’ve been having this same argument. Saint or fraud, idol or arrogant prick: why do we seem to need him to be one or the other?

He was flawed, full of contradictions, and in Walden endeavored to document the changing seasons of his thoughts and moods as painstakingly as he did the depths and temperatures of Walden. So he liked trains, and also didn’t. My feelings about air travel and iPhones are similarly conflicted. He was of his time, and of his place, and worked hard to attain a vantage from which he could perceive both. “Who are we? Where are we?” he once asked because for him those questions were both excellent and inseparable. He sometimes sounds like a libertarian, sometimes like a progressive, sometimes like a conservative, conflicted as he was about tradition and change. He wrote so much and so contradictorily—he was an essayist, in other words—you could probably cherry pick a quote to recommend him for membership in the John Birch Society, the Communist Party, the Chamber of Commerce, or the Weather Underground if you wanted to. He had old-fashioned, stoical ideas about manliness and prized it a bit overmuch, but he also considered Margaret Fuller a soul mate.

And he was a poor student who once lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove and spent his whole life searching for them; a moral philosopher; a patriot and a dissident; a prose stylist so exquisite Dickinson, Frost, Tolstoy, Proust, Carson, Robinson, Dillard, and Schulz admired his sentences; who tried his best to live and write deliberately, and succeeded better than most; an epic perambulist and a committed abolitionist; a sufferer of tuberculosis from his youth to his death who nevertheless ascended Mount Katahdin; a naturalist who studied a pond, scum and all, so curiously and attentively he glimpsed an ecosystem and perhaps even a cosmos through the distorted mirror of his own reflection. “I am not worth seeing personally—the stuttering, blundering, clod-hopper that I am,” Thoreau, the indicted egotist, once wrote. Why can’t we take him at his word?