Henry David Thoreau ★★★
I found this a little difficult to read, but still overall worthwhile. Written in the years preceding 1854, /Walden/ adopts a somewhat archaic style and includes a message that ranges from obtuse and outdated to strikingly modern and relevant. I found enough insights to make pushing through the denser sections worth the time.
It’s interesting to compare Thoreau’s style with Craig Mod or Colin Fletcher. Both of these more modern writers have a similar “preciousness” to their style that comes across as thoughtful, rather than Thoreau’s sometimes self-indulgent impression. I wonder if sharing a time context with the modern writers allows me to better connect and imagine myself in their intricate descriptions of mundanity. Whereas Walden’s archaic settings inhibits a similar connection, making me feel less interested, and causing his writing to appear, I don’t know, overly precious? instead of carefully deep.
Thoreau in many ways feels like a man out of his own time, almost like someone plucked from a niche circle of today and dropped back 180 years. Or perhaps many of his ideas and thoughts are really deeper human truths — neither modern nor archaic, but simply inherent human instinct.
Some of the most striking similarities to people or ideas you’ll find on reddit, twitter, or YouTube today include:
Of course we have achieved many great and positive things with the internet, but many are also concerned with problematic trends like dopamine manipulation in social media, vapid discourse, getting stuck in a permanent state of consumption.
Thoreau significantly predates the total connection of today’s internet, but he does muse on “modern” inventions in general, and the network of his day: the telegraph.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements;" there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
— (pg. 40)
Apparently modern people are not the only ones who reach for their phones after waking. Humans crave new news, whether it carries /real/ meaning or not.
Hardly a man takes a half-hour's nap asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinel.
[...]
After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe,” —and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
— (pg. 68)
Getting your own hands dirty is not only the most effective teacher, but also exposes you to the magic of your own natural sight and develops your own poetic faculty.
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged.
— (pg. 36)
If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the mores in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.
[...]
To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it."
— (pg. 40)
Exploring the wilderness adds dimension to our lives. At the same time, wilderness is beyond us, a place we can never fully explore or fathom. A place that is bigger than us, that expands beyond our limits. We are always visitors, and we do not control the world there.
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.
— (pg. 211)
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
— (pg. 128)
Sometimes the gems of nature cast new and interesting reflections back to us when we look into them.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.
— (pg. 88)
I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
— (pg. 92)
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, “All intelligences awake with the morning.”
— (pg. 65)
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, l observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a /duellum/, but a /bellum/, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.
— (pg. 155)
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western sky, and the mother o'-pearl flocks which sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which earth offered no worthy foundation.
— (pg. 181)
Why do we build monuments to rich and successful people, why do we memorialize them? Why don’t we leave them alone and live our own lives?
This connects semi-tenuously to the idea that society shouldn’t depend on billionaires to save them. The Bill Gates documentary on Netflix is a monument to him, his accomplishments, and his memory. Why should we worship him? We should not. The ultra rich spend loads of money to /appear/ the way they want us to perceive them; often they want us to see them as not that different than ourselves. In reality they are almost a different species, and not worth our worship.
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place.
[...]
Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
— (pg. 44)
This relates to conservation efforts, wilderness protection, resource exploitation, etc. The most recent example as I write this being the Bear’s Ears monument reduction Trump rolled out in favor of oil, gas, and mining interests.
/Flint's Pond!/ Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;— so it is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never /saw/ it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not from him who could show no title to it but the deed which a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him,—him who thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance cursed all the shores; who exhausted the land around it, and would fain have exhausted the water within it; who regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry meadow,—there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes,—and would have drained and sold it for the mud at its bottom.
— (pg. 134)
This relates back to the idea that money is overvalued in the first place. There are other ways to be rich, and you destroy that richness by over-indexing on capitalist endeavors.
I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market /for/ his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
— (pg. 135)
This is a struggle of mine, what is proper balance of maximizing my own utility vs. helping other achieve the same? I personally feel a sense of guilt for avoiding philanthropy. This became a topic of conversation on a date once, and the woman had a similar position to Thoreau; there are enough people doing good that I shouldn’t feel guilty if I don’t find myself to be one of them.
I still think this isn’t scalable though (i.e. if everyone adopting this approach things would be bad overall).
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town: and if I had nothing to do—for the devil finds employment for the idle—I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation, and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.
— (pg. 54)
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition—the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth—that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore.
— (pg. 125)
I’ve struggled a bit with this concept. It certainly attracts me, the idea of living life to its fullest, smashing down every obstacle, extracting every joy, and birthing some creation out of myself into the world. The trouble with this, though, is that I don’t think I’ve every experienced much of life to this level of depth. I don’t feel much, if anything, /in my bones/. This hearkens back to studying C.S. Lewis in Oxford.
As a bit of an side, while I was just writing those grandiose statements in the paragraph above I had the thought that they felt a lot like what a marketer or advertising copy writer would want to plaster across a bill board. Smash down every obstacle (in this SUV). Extract every joy (with this bottle of Coke). Birth some creation into the world (with these fancy notebooks).
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have /somewhat hastily/ concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
— (pg. 66)
Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
— (pg. 198)