‘Be Not Simply Good. Be Good for Something.’

As American and Israeli bombs fall on Tehran, an Iranian scholar looks to Henry David Thoreau for connection and guidance.

At right, Alireza Taghdarreh of Tehran. At left, Don Henley, of Eagles and Hotel California. They met and both spoke at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, on the Institute’s 25th anniversary in 2015. This happened to be the very day that the US and Iran announced the now-abandoned JCPOA nuclear deal. (Photo by Matt Burns of the Walden Woods Project.)

This is another installment on the “public memory” gap between the US and Iran. But it will be quite different from the previous two, here and here, and more in that chronology soon.

I’m writing this time not about presidents, shahs, or ayatollahs but about a man who has been trying his best to help each culture understand its deep, under-recognized connections to the other.

This post is about our friend Alireza Taghdarreh, whose well-being and even survival in Tehran Deb and I have been unsure of until the past few days. My main purpose for today is to give a brief sample of the messages he has been trying to give his countrymen—and ours.

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‘Thoreau felt he had the blood of Persian poets in his hands.’

Back in 2015, Deb and I first met Ali, as I will refer to him, at the Walden Institute event that we were fortunate to attend. Ali was there on his first visit to the place he had spent the previous decade of his life thinking and writing about. Through that time, he had carefully been translating Thoreau’s Walden for an Iranian readership.

Don Henley—yes, that Don Henley—was there because he has been a serious environmentalist, and in particular a defender of the ecosystem and historical heritage of Thoreau and Walden. If you’ve watched the new three-part PBS documentary series on Thoreau—by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers, presented by Ken Burns—you’ve seen Henley listed as an Executive Producer.

The message from Ali in his presentation (which you can see on YouTube here, including Henley’s intro) was about the spiritual connection between the most renowned American Transcendentalist writers, and the great Persian poets and philosophers, from Rumi onward. As I wrote 11 years ago, after hearing him talk, in words I could have written today:

I have learned over the years and around the world that it matters if people from one culture generally feel a connection with, versus an estrangement from, people from another….

Ali Taghdarreh’s entire theme was: From his little room in Tehran, he recognized the human, the transcendent, the universal in the works of that quintessential American, Henry David Thoreau. Today he had a chance to say so at the real Walden Pond that he had thought about but never seen. I have imagined that, given a chance, most people in Iran and the United States would recognize a similar connection. That does not obviate the complications of this proposed agreement [JCPOA] or the conflicts of national interests. But it means something, and something left out of a lot of the fevered “let’s bomb them before they do more evil!” talk.

Deb and I stayed in touch with Ali (and Don Henley) after this event. A year afterwards, I posted a guest essay by Ali on the meaning of Mother’s Day in Iran.

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As the bombs fell…

When the US and Israeli attacks began, I sent emails to Ali in Tehran, to tell him that we were thinking of him and his family. Until last week, we heard nothing in return. We could imagine many reasons, some of them very dark.

About a week ago, along with others among Ali’s many friends and supporters around the world, we started getting replies. With Ali’s permission, the rest of this post consists of material from him.

First, his messages to outside-world friends this past week, from Tehran. Then, his introduction to his latest piece, comparing isolation and “freedom” as rendered in Walden with that of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Then, the full text of his essay from several years ago, likening Thoreau to the famed Persian poet Rumi.

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1) Emails from Ali.

Some selections:

-Eight days ago, our first message back from him since the war began:

So far we are alive and well. Our connection was restored only a few hours ago -- with some limited access to emails, not much more. Our neighborhood was heavily bombed, and we had some very dangerous moments. We have managed to stay alive.

Followed by this, yesterday:

I do not know how long I can send and receive emails. I cannot do anything else on the internet.

-Three days ago, about the reason for his literary work:

I do not mean to merely translate books. My goal is to do deep comparative studies between Persian and world literature and to tie the roots of our cultures together. This is the dream that gives me motivation to survive against death and destruction.

-Also three days ago, about his ongoing plans, which began with a mention of his new essay in The Concord Saunterer:

In it, I have compared the meaning of freedom in a Gulag camp and Walden Pond through a comparison between the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Walden.

Americans, and anyone else living in the free world, should not be too comfortable with the mere fact that they are simply living in a free land. It is our understanding and our approach to life that makes us free men or bondsmen in a deeper sense….

Please tell the American people that I would love to speak with them about my comparative studies between Rumi from Iran and Thoreau, Emerson and other American poets. This will unite us mystically and poetically.

Contrast this with the thoughts of a world potentate who says that at his whim, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

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2) How Alireza found Thoreau.

The opening paragraphs of his new piece, “Evolution for Revolutions,” about Walden and Ivan Denisovich.¹ (Update: The essay is now available for download as a PDF, here.)

Before I thought about learning English or heard the names Thoreau and Emerson, my soul was being prepared to meet them through the works of Persian poets who lived some 800 years earlier:

Rumi, Hafez, Saadi and other mystic poets who were always recited by my unschooled parents and grandparents during my childhood. Those were years when Iran and the United States shared close cultural connections. I watched American movies and television series based on works of American writers like Mark Twain, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams among others.

Those Persian poets and mystics, far from me in time, and the Americans, far in geography, created a vibrant and colorful life for me. These literary and cultural seeds kept a distant world alive within me. I especially loved Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983), which portrayed a simple, frontier way of living enriched by personal love and the revival of essential values.

When the 1979 revolution came to Iran, Little House on the Prairie was one of many American television series taken off the air by the censorship of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), leaving behind a quiet yearning for the parts of American culture I had come to cherish—a yearning I carried within me for many years, until I finally healed it through literature. Literature has helped me realize that distance does not mean disappearance, and political separation can be bridged by the power of art to reach human depths that politics cannot change.

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3) ‘Poetry heals where politics hurts.’

And here is an essay about the philosophical connections between Thoreau and Rumi. This was published in 2020 in the Thoreau Society Bulletin. I am quoting it in full with Ali’s permission:

Light and Language in Thoreau and Rumi

By Alireza Taghdarreh

For Natalie Baker, Kate Manolakos and Robert Hajek

With all the unhappiness
Going on in the world,
Our friendship goes on;
The world should behold.
Nobody may rule
The hearts that desire
Friendship and love
That never expire.

Thoreau says, “Be not simply good—be good for something.“ As a translator of Walden into Persian, I know that a mere good translation of this masterpiece is not enough. If put to use, such a translation is good for increasing understanding between my people in Iran and the people of the United States at an extremely dangerous time. The excellent translations of the poetry of the celebrated Persian poet Rumi by my dear friend Coleman Barks do the same in the United States. Poetry heals where politics hurts.

Sometimes I go beyond my own translation and read sentences by Thoreau in English to those who are learning this language in my country. This makes the connection even stronger. It also reveals some linguistic characteristics that may remain hidden in translation.

I recently started a discussion with my students about this short sentence excerpted from Walden:

I sat in my sunny doorway rapt in a revery.

After a journey of more than 15 years in the book, sentences, phrases and even individual words it contains are sacred souvenirs for me. The above sentence, for instance, fills my soul with light. It also contains a play on words that is a doorway into Thoreau’s mastery of language and meaning.

If you listen, you can hear a pun emphasized by the alliteration of “r“ and the dactylic rhythm of “rapt in a revery.“ This could be heard as “wrapped in a revery.“ (Maybe we could also say that Thoreau’s soul is rapt in a revery while his body is wrapped in it.)

Given the different spelling and etymologies of the two words (”rapt” is from Latin rapere, to seize; “wrap” is from Germanic roots, “to bend, twist, wind”), the pun happens entirely in the sound of the words. It is found, appropriately, in the chapter entitled “Sounds.”

With this and other puns, Thoreau’s words continue their journey in our souls as we ruminate on Walden even after closing the book. A great American poet, William Stafford, says, “Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside.“ It was while my head was left in my closed copy of Walden that I discovered this pun.

I also asked myself why Thoreau says “I sat in my sunny doorway“ instead of “I sat in the sun at my doorway.“ In the phrase he did not use, the doorway is one noun and the sun another, the object of the preposition “in.” The doorway is simply an architectural feature. In Thoreau’s version, “sunny“ is the same word used literally for the quality of light, and metaphorically for a person of bright and warm character. Thoreau associates his doorway with a very pleasant character. And this is the doorway he sat in.

In Walden, life is immersed in light. Thoreau here has an intuitive recognition of well-established scientific fact, that without the energy brought to earth by the light of the sun, no life would exist. Thoreau did believe that “all poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora.” In many passages of Walden, his journals, and his essays, light is both an everyday presence and a higher power. Heavenly light is the source of purification and clarification for Thoreau’s soul and his beloved Walden Pond. It cleanses Walden Pond of impurities left from our mundane world:

“...no storms, no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush,—this the light dust-cloth.”

Thoreau’s mirror reflects light and spreads it through the world around, while impurities presented to it are not reflected back; they are swept aside and sink away.

It seems to me that Walden Pond is not just for the bathing of the body, nor is Thoreau’s Walden a mere entertainment for the mind. They are both useful for the purification of the mind and soul if only we are standing before them awake and honest.

The passage quoted above, about Walden Pond as a mirror reminds me of a story I once heard about a Persian dervish. They say that a dervish arrived at a temple and asked the doorman, “What kind of place is this?” The doorman answered: “This is a place where you must leave envy, lust, greed, anger, hostility, meanness, and the like behind to enter.“ To this, the dervish said, “If I were able to put all these negative traits behind, why would I need to enter this place? I need a place where I can carry in my impurities, and emerge without them.“ This is how the light in Thoreau’s words purifies our souls.

This is a very Sufi characteristic, as the word “Sufi,” by definition, means purified. Sufis do not answer hate, anger, and other negative emotions with the same emotions. A Sufi master once pointed to a mill and said, “A Sufi should be like that mill in taking coarse grains and returning soft flour.“ In this way, Sufis purify themselves and the world around them. And this same truth is revealed in Martin Luther King’s words when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.“

Rumi, the poet of my land, is also one of the children of this light. To Rumi, the fact that light reveals no apparent color makes it the symbol of unification among humans. Rumi believed that the reflection of light from various objects creates colors, and perpetuates an illusion of differences among us. If we free our minds from these reflections of worldly objects, and focus on the light itself, we will reach the unity that our poets and mystics dreamed for us.

Rumi says: “Away from all allusions and illusions, it is only the light of the light of the light of the light.” With each repetition of the word “light,” Rumi distances us farther from colors, shams, and reflections. Later, this unity culminates in love, for as Rumi says, “Love is the whole thing. We are the pieces.“

The light of Thoreau’s sunny doorway also becomes a part of this light of the light as the actual sun disappears in the horizon, clouds fill the sky, and evening darkens the day. as he writes in the Spring chapter of Walden. “Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain.”

Eventually, this light of light permeates Thoreau’s whole world wherever he goes:

“I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose.”

Even after forty years of bitter separation, representing the failure of our politicians, our poets succeed in uniting our souls. The ultimate destination of the light in Rumi’s and Thoreau’s words is the souls of their readers in America and Iran, and around the world. As we ruminate on Rumi’s poetry, this light is the thread that sews our souls together. And Walden is indeed a sunny doorway of profound thought for the readers who will pause for a bit of a revery.

Alireza Taghdarreh is but one among the 90+ million citizens of Iran. But he is among the people the American president has threatened to kill.

1. Ali opens the piece with this dedication, which he has asked me to share.

For Kathi Anderson, the executive director of the Walden Woods Project and our generous host in the summer of 2025, who placed Thoreau’s manuscripts—and every available resource—into my hands for research and translation projects in Iran.