You are what you write.

‘Maybe this was a big mistake’, thought Henry David Thoreau for the umpteenth time that cold, lonely and grey Massachusetts winter.  He sat in his dreary dripping, dark and dank 10 x 15 log cabin of his own construct, looking past the dead flies on his little window sill at the sleet blowing sideways over a frozen pond and through the numerous permeable kinks in the armor of his castle.  More like a dungeon.  He heard the uncatchable rat stirring beneath his bed of rags as he put the last of his daily ration of wood on the smoldering dinner fire to cook his beans and corn gruel.  “It’s going to be another frozen night’ he thought.  ‘Simplify, my ass, I am wet and cold and hungry and lonely’.  

It seemed like such a good idea in the spring, and summer wasn’t half bad, besides the bugs, but the autumn winds blew early and he underestimated his need for fire wood.  Now he could only trudge through the deep snow to collect sticks and branches for his needs.  ‘Screw economy’, he thought as he remembered the home hearth where his father took care of the fire and his mother took care of everything else.  That home hearth was only two miles away, but his stubborn pride prevented him from abandoning his experiment and limping home in defeat.  He was a laughingstock when he went out to the pond and he would be damned if he would be a laughingstock going home.  ‘Wait till I write my book’, he fumed.

So he took out his quill pen and rough paper and began to write again, in a different voice, a voice of confidence, of character, of unrepentant joy.  He wrote of his hypothetically noble relationship with the land and the pond, the forest and the animals, his farm and his house.  He wrote of reducing his life to the basics, the things that count, time, solitude, thoughtfulness, being.  No things, no people.  He was distracted by the drip drip from the leaky roof on to his paper and dismissed thoughts of Thanksgiving dinner with the family, his clean warm bed at home or of the roll in the hay he took with a local farm girl before he self-quarantined in the wilderness.  But he persevered with his fiction.   ‘Why should I tell them’ he said with loathing self-pity.

As he scribbled his fictional account he started to warm to the task.  The last log in the fire caught an updraft and flared its heat and light into the room.  He felt inspired to tell his story, truthfully or not.  The words flowed from his pen and he dipped his quill deep and wrote hard on the rough paper with passion. He spun a yarn for the ages about self-reliance and economy.  He invented figures of superior planning and stories of enlightened experiences.  He incorporated all the high brow tales of Transcendental Naturalism, nature worship and self sufficiency he could think of and when he was done, he sat back feeling better, almost believing it himself.  He stood up and scratched his itchy butt, drank the rest of his putrid melted ice water and thought warmly, ‘Maybe this was not such a bad idea after all’.