and I have an essential difference of philosophy: I am an Epicurean, and he's an asshole,
A puritan may go to his brownbread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle.
Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten, It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors,
sitelink
Walden has some great moments, I appreciate that Thoreau was not just the original hippie, but the original of a particularly cool kind of hippie: the practical kind.
I grew up around people like this in Western Mass people who were really running small farms, building their own shit, forging their own ways hippies with skills, as opposed to sitelinkthe groovy kind.
They're a terrific sort of people, Doing the stuff of life yourself is great,
And I've always loved that most famous quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, " No matter what's going on for me, it makes me feel good, When things aren't going well, it makes me feel less alone, When things are going great it makes me feel smugly superior, and that's nice too,
I heart introverts
I liked parts of the Solitude chapter, Everyone's probably heard this quote:
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating, I love to be alone, I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude,But here's a passage I like even more:
We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.Ha "give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are, " Awesome.
We meet at meals three times a day,and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.
We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.
And he doesn't fuck around
My edition includes On Civil Disobedience, wherein Thoreau who, as you may know, went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the criminal Mexican War does some pretty fire and brimstone shit:
When a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military laws, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.Kinda makes you feel like a wiener, still complaining about Al Gore, right Thoreau was a badass,
What makes this duty so much more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.
. . Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it, It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail, A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men,
But
he's sortof obnoxious
I think one thing that bugs me is, he's constantly banging on about how easy life would be if everyone just did like he did.
And partly, as he says himself, that's because he "simplifies" he gives up almost every luxury, so it's much easier to meet his needs.
I don't think he even has the internet, so that alone saves him likea month, But partly it strikes me as dishonest,
There's a smugness about Walden that puts me off, It's particularly grating in the Baker Farm chapter, where he lectures a poor guy with a wife and three kids about how much easier life would be if they just did it Thoreau's way.
And I was like a what if this dude thinks his kids should eat anything besides beans and b if you get cold you just go to your mom's house for the weekend, so your whole shtick is a little bit disingenuous, homie.
Thoreau has a big safety net, Even the land he's living on is borrowed from Emerson, The poor Irish guy has no such advantages,
There may be a reason for his weirdness, My book club got in a long and interesting discussion of whether Thoreau may have had Asperger's Syndrome, More on that sitelinkhere and sitelinkhere, and if you Google "Thoreau Asperger's" you'll find plenty more, There's even a whole book called sitelinkWriters on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome Have Influenced Literary Writing that throws in Dickinson, Yeats and Melville for good measure.
I don't consider myself qualified to have an opinion about this, but it's a fun thing to bring up at your next dinner party.
And he's pretty longwinded
I mean, at one point towards the end he goes on for like five pages about sand.
"I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.
" Whaaaat the fuck, Thoreau, shut up,
So it's tough to know what to make of this book,
I rarely enjoyed reading it, but I underlined like half of it, Okay, sometimes it was just so I wouldn't forget what an asshole he is, He's often right, but always annoying, There's a lot going on here, and much of it is worthwhile, but I can't exactly recommend it to you, because I doubt you'll like it.
I didn't. I respected it. But I didn't like it, Thoreau as "Diogenes of the industurial century",
Although his writings would later receive widespread acclaim, Thoreau's ideas were not universally applauded by some of his contemporaries in literary circles.
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of "unmanly" effeminacy and "womanish solitude", while deeming him a selfindulgent "skulker.
" Nathaniel Hawthorne was also critical of Thoreau, writing that he "repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men.
" In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the "wicked" and "heathenish" message of Walden, decreeing that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs.
"
Thoreau responded to such criticisms in a paragraph of his work "Walden", by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries: "I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.
Some have asked what I got to eat if I did not feel lonesome if I was not afraid and the like.
Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.
Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience, Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives.
. . I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
excerpt from "Henry David Thoreau" of Wikipedia I've read Walden many times now since that first time in high school, I will always love this book, and it reveals itself anew with each reading,
When I first encountered Thoreau in high school, his words rang in my soul like a prophet's manifesto, I admired what seemed to be his unique courage and absolute integrity, He inspired me to want to "live deliberately," but I knew that a solitary life in a cabin was beyond my abilities.
His will seemed so much more resolute than anything I could ever be capable of,
That was a couple of decades ago, What struck on this latest recent reading is just how much this is a young man's book, The voice is that of an idealist, a passionate and lonely misfit who longs for a better way to live and for more authentic relationships with others as well as with himself.
I know now that Thoreau lived more like an energetic slacker than a true renunciate, He was too principled to work as a schoolmaster he refused to beat his charges, and there wasn't much he cared to do apart from reading, writing, and observing nature closely.
He didn't have a family to take care of, and his parents were indulgent of his wishes,
His life at Walden was bracing, but it wasn't filled with hardships, His cabin was just a short walk from Concord, and Thoreau went home for Sunday dinners and stayed at the Emersons' place when it got too cold.
His folks took care of his laundry, His life of simplicity was strictly voluntary, and he had numerous safety nets, While these facts make Henry David a bit less intimidating, they also make him more recognizable as a human being,
I like this young man, with his snobbery and his idealism, but I know that as a fleshandblood person he would have been hard to get to know, and even harder to love.
He was probably afraid of intimacy, and even more afraid of failing to live up to his exacting standards, Thoreau was fascinated with purity, His disgust for "brute" appetites is something that we now think we understand as related to a fear of sexuality, He was deeply interested in Hindu dietary laws, and had an aversion to all forms of consumption, For him, the ideal was to become so pure that a few drops of nectar would be sufficient sustenance, Like Thoreau, I'm an ethical vegetarian, so I understand somewhat that urge toward purity, But my appetites are huge, and my life is in many ways a big, sloppy, comfortable mess, In contrast, Thoreau wanted to be free of all social constraints, free of the taint of commerce, free to be "wild.
" But his vision of wildness was of a clean, solitary life, He didn't want to merge or mingle with anything or anyone,
The descriptions of Walden and the surrounding landscapes are sublime, They will never get stale, and I enjoy them even more now that I live a few miles from Concord and have visited the pond in different seasons.
I look forward to reading this beautiful book again in a few years, I wonder what I'll notice next time
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