One hundred and seventy-seven years ago, Henry David Thoreau built a house at Walden Pond, on the outskirts of Concord, Massachusetts. The house was more of a shanty — a 10-by-15-foot, single-room abode constructed of thin pines and recycled walls, windows, and floorboards. Inside was a bed, a writing table, and a fireplace. Outside, a bean garden and a view of the changing seasons. The whole project cost him $28.12, equivalent to about $900 today.

Thoreau lived two years, two months, and two days at Walden. He wasn’t exactly a hermit. He conducted business in town, took his laundry to his mom, and regularly entertained guests at his cabin. But those two years were an experiment, as Thoreau himself said, in how to “live deliberately” — to “shake off the village” and its addictions to a quickening pace and an endlessly growing economy and to rediscover the “essential facts of life.”

In the age of climate change, Covid-19, and technologies like high-speed Internet, literary agent and anthologist Andrew Blauner commissioned 26 essayists, journalists, and novelists to reflect on Thoreau’s experiment. There’s a lot from Thoreau that doesn’t translate well to modern times — his occasional misanthropy, exaggeration to the point of fabrication, and his access to his own private “wild.” (He built the cabin on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property; Walden Pond was less of a wilderness hermitage than prime waterfront real estate.) But Now Comes Good Sailing shows that we shouldn’t dismiss the transcendentalist nor the lessons he learned at Walden. Twenty-six essays show that Thoreau still has something to say.

The 26 writers engage with all aspects of Thoreau’s legacy, from his soliloquies on the economy and consumption, to his thoughts on civil disobedience, to his contribution to scientific observation.

Writer Michelle Nijhuis celebrates Thoreau’s love of phenology — his keen observations of natural changes and the bridge he helped build between nature as science and nature as poetry. Novelist Lauren Groff thanks Thoreau for reminding her to appreciate the singularity of place. “Look at a pond no more miraculous than any other pond in the world, which is to say infinitely miraculous,” she writes. “Look at your own ponds whatever shape they take.”

One theme throughout the anthology is applying Thoreau’s lessons to the struggles of our age.

“We have a new kind of village to shake off, the digital village, with its particular demands for performance,” writes Sherry Turkle, a sociologist and psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the human relationship with technology. Thoreau offers some loose guidance, Turkle says. We don’t need to escape to the wild to know that we would all benefit — emotionally, physically — from occasionally disconnecting from our screen-intense schedules, packed as they are with Zoom conferences and doomscrolling on social media.

Thoreau’s connection to Walden also offers an example of how we can appreciate nature around us, even if we need to go looking for it. Journalist Jordan Salama explores this theme by chronicling his 24-hour stay on Pea Island, a small spit of rocky land in the middle of Long Island Sound. Surrounded by an industrial shoreline, commercial boat traffic, and planes roaring in and out of LaGuardia, Salama reflects on his effort to acquaint himself with this vestige of nature in an otherwise built environment: “You can’t best fight to save something if you don’t have the chance to fall in love with it in the first place.”

The essays in Now Comes Good Sailing vary widely in tone and style, offering a range of perspectives on how Thoreau’s nineteenth-century writing can still find relevance in 2022. Of course, our world today looks much different than Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Walden Pond, especially, has changed.

In one of the last essays in the book, public radio reporter Stacey Vanek Smith takes a trip to Walden. She’s immediately disappointed by the crowds, the parking fees, the commodification of a place where Thoreau lambasted the commodified world. But she doesn’t dwell on the disappointment. She takes a walk, away from the crowds, toward the cabin site. She catches the light shine through trees, hears a flock of geese overhead, and remembers Thoreau’s cue to hear and see in a world of noise and distraction. “There it was,” she writes, “life.”