For the Covid quarantine I have been re-reading Walden. Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual
of romantic transcendentalism, satire, and self-reliance. Why not, what else is more appropriate now than
sequestered nature-worship and introspection.
You are what you read.
We all read this story in high school and loved the idea,
for about ten minutes, but then went back to over-complicate our lives with
college and jobs, wives and kids, houses and dogs. We have not really come that far in our
efforts to simplify. But now we are all
forced into our own little Walden, our own little 100 x 150 foot cabins in the
woods or on the beach or in the city.
With this self-imposed semi-isolation, we are compelled to contemplate
and experience the simple life. All the
distractions and minutia have been stripped away and we have been forced to
honestly look at our lives and ourselves, who we are and who we want to be.
Thoreau self-quarantined in 1845, in his 10 x 15 cabin on
the pond for a year or two. Simplify he
said. But simple ain’t easy. Actually, he was only a mile from Concord,
and he went home on weekends to have his mother do his laundry and iron his
puffy shirts, but it felt like the wilderness of western Massachusetts, and it
probably was. ‘Many men go fishing all
their lives’, he said, ‘without knowing that it is not fish that they are after’.
The first chapter of Walden is called Economics; not Adam
Smith or Milton Friedman economics but personal microeconomics. Henry talks about all the things he has but does
not need, like houses and farms, animals, and imported food. How the farmer is a slave to his farm, as the
shoemaker is slave to his shop, for generations. How we are all slaves to our own
sustainability, sustenance, maintenance, and entertainment. How most of our concerns are about stuff and
not people, how eventually the possessions possess the possessor.
His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land
around Walden, but it was too expensive for Henry to purchase at eight dollars
an acre ($300 today) so he was a squatter, with permission. Thoreau paid him back by cutting his lawn and
trimming his flowers, but they had a classic have/have not relationship. When Ralph visited Henry in jail for civil
disobedience (not paying taxes) he famously asked him ‘what are you doing in
there’ to which Henry replied, ‘what are you doing out there’.
Henry cleared off 2.5 acres near Walden and planted a garden
the first year, but he was too busy farming the first year and had to sell much
of his food for only 15 dollars ($50). The
next year he planted less than an half-acre that he could farm just ‘with his
left hand, at odd hours’. Then he built
his house mostly with stuff that he found lying around for $28 ($1000) and he
was all set. No oxen, nor horses, no
cows, no sheep, no fertilizer, no tractors, no bankers, no contractors, no Home
Depot.
Ralph Waldo said, ‘Every spirit builds itself a house, and
beyond itself, a world’. Henry David
probably said, ‘yeah/no, maybe not’. Ralphie,
the thinker and innovator, wrote his classics “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” a
few years before and Thoreau, the doer, decided to give his social experiment a
try. Hank was a more approachable voice
for the nature movement than Ralph, less grand-eloquent, so he went to the
woods to write his first book. Henry was
set up in his cabin for life, but he only made it two years before moving on to
something else. He had TADDs - Transcendentalist
Attention Deficit Disorder, and he got a little bored.
Thoreau tried to show us that it does not take much to be
happy, that less is more. I picture him
in modern days, a Rastafarian street person living under the viaduct, or a
bearded curmudgeon living in a desert cave in New Mexico or cabin in
Montana. But he was well educated at Harvard,
ambitious, thoughtful, and outspoken, and might be like me, living in the
material world but fighting the good fight to simplify while keeping up with
the Joneses.
Our collective sequestration would appeal to Henry, as it
appeals to me. I am lucky to be safe and
healthy, wealthy, and wise, or at least three out of four, so I can enjoy my
plethora of free time. They say that
free time is the blessing and curse of the upper and lower class but for a
while it is forced on the declining middle class. Some can embrace it, some resist. Some struggle, being only one paycheck or
health emergency away from the poor house.
Some scream irresponsibly, to return to ‘normal’ and continue our
mindless consumption and pursuit of self-entertainment for something to do.
If only we could be more like Hank and Ralphie and be
content to let the day come to us, let our lives proceed by their own design. This is an opportunity, not to get ‘back’ to
normal but to evolve forward, to reinvent ourselves and the world as we know
it. Life is not a spectator sport but it
is sometimes too much with us, trying to make our legacy, and would be better
off if we all just tried to leave it a better place. This is our chance to let our problems solve
themselves, as they often do, with or without us, and just kick back like
Henry, and let the mystery be. We should
all be more content with ourselves and each other and simplify the world we
live in.
