Maybe it was timing, but I read Walden around 25 and it rocked my world view. When I was belatedly trying to patch up a marriage going south by standing up for my ideals (after torpedoing it to begin with), I argued with my then-wife about Thoreau. She thought he was the worst sort of person and his views were poison, which genuinely shocked me. For one thing, I doubt she ever read Walden beyond a few quotes in some essays attacking the man's ideas as radical. It was clarifying to find my mate had slid so far into the life trap Thoreau so clearly warns against in the opening pages of Walden. What it really meant was that we were two very different sorts of people.
This was what we had become in a nutshell - efficient and successful by all external measures without picking any of the finer fruits. We were genuinely very different on a fundamental level. She was satisfied, happy to be a machine, enjoying the external feedback signals of success and internalizing them as her own soul (this line is too good to fuck up with qualifiers, but you know this is too absolute a statement to be fully true).Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men ; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Thoreau plots out and explores one end of the dipole of being human, the individual. He frankly abandons the other pole, the group, disdains it and mocks it. It's not like there isn't enough said and written about the joys of conformity, the tide of history, the winning friends and influencing people side of it all. Normally when someone goes too far toward this end of the dipole, they are decried as selfish or greedy. In the prisoner's dilemma, they are the ones who always betray you according to the collectivist script. It is liberating to hear that the other side of the coin can be shiny too.
If I am disillusioned or unworthy of this book it comes with my indifference to the second half. The first part of Walden is absolutely brilliant IMO. The second half sets the tone for the Emerson crowd, extolling the virtues of nature and walking around in the woods. At least that's what I remember. Once you've jettisoned the rest of humanity what is there left to do? It's like the first Matrix movie that way. The real 'holy shit' is in the first half. The second half is standard 'guns, lots of guns' except its nature instead of guns. And that's the flip side of any pure work really. You have to be pure to get a really good look at the unexplored territory, the south pole of being human (the north pole being pure group dynamics). But it isn't a picture that scales or is super dynamic. It just helps keep you balanced.
Perhaps that is why he was so careful to say how little one needed to stay alive and be content. True enough, but he lived on borrowed land, used borrowed tools to make his simple cabin and moved back into town after less than two years. We don't live at the south pole or the north pole for long, but favor the temperate zone because living is much easier there.
Because the dangers of the modern world have always been more from too much conformity rather than too little, I think Walden is a great and timely book for the ages.
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