Friendship
The theme of friendship is implied throughout A Week in the companionship of the two travelers as they make their journey. John Thoreau, Henry's brother and the muse invoked at the beginning of the book, is never mentioned by name, nor is the depth of the emotional bond between the two referred to specifically and personally. The absence of comment on the relationship resembles Thoreau's silence regarding the ascent of Agiocochook. It suggests intensity of emotion, both private and deeply meaningful. The theme is explicitly developed in the long outpouring on friendship in "Wednesday." Thoreau's thoughts on the subject are highly idealistic and, the reader suspects, impossible to achieve and sustain outside of art. But the lyricism of this section is in keeping with Thoreau's idealism in presenting his other themes in A Week.
Neither the possibility of realizing the type of friendship that Thoreau extols nor his specific pronouncements on the nature of true friendship are as important as Thoreau's relationship with his brother, his sense of loss that must be worked through after John's death, and his writing the book to achieve some closure. Thoreau writes, "The only danger in Friendship is that it will end." He goes on to discuss the end of friendship through excessive criticism. Although he does not place the loss of a friend to death in the same category as loss through misunderstanding or failure of sympathy, either situation results in bereavement. He writes positively of the inspiration achieved through the death as well as the life of a friend. Because John's death did, in fact, inspire Thoreau to write A Week, the book itself affirms the endurance of friendship beyond death.
