finish reading Thoreau's Walden

well, i did start reading it… and i found it kind of boring… profound, i know i know, blah blah. but i’m giving up, i’ll read the cliff notes and move onto books that i really want to read.

...i still haven’t read it… it’s coming…

We finished Walden. The last chapter was wonderful—quite a reward for many chapters of often tedious reading. I love the review of the book by Yonder: http://www.43things.com/entries/view/1190722.

In retrospect I must say that I am glad I read the book; I am better for it. I’m glad to know what the meat of Walden really is—Thoreau the naturalist discussing in great detail the landscape and animals of Walden pond and the surrounding wood.

And I love reading his philosophy, his intriguing rejection of the American dream. I have throughout this book collected many snippets of my favorite passages and chronicled them in my journal because they are too wonderful to forget.

Some closing words from the conclusion:
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. ... The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

I don’t know if I’d advise everyone to work through all of Walden. Depends what you’re looking for, I guess.

If it’s romantic, liquid prose you want, or warm feelings about the natural world, okay, read it from cover to cover. The whole thing. The philosophy, the rants, the laundry lists, the miniscule precision of bubbles forming in ice. Thoreau the artist.

If you’re looking for a practical philosophy of living you can confine yourself to reading the first two or three chapters and the last chapter, where Thoreau lays out his plan for simplicity and pseudo-self-sufficiency. The rest is research notes. This is Thoreau the rational philosopher.

If you’re looking for a philosophy of the wild, or practical steps to strike a balance between the natural and human worlds, then forget it. You’ll just get frustrated. Thoreau will come off like a sheltered, intellectual prig.

What you get from it will depend on where you fall between two polar perceptions of nature. There’s “romantic nature”—the artistic, spiritual perception of the earth as benign mother of all—and there’s “kill you quick nature”—the cynical, rational view of the earth as totally indifferent to the individual. Probably you fall more to one side or the other. Cultures that depend intimately on the natural world for their survival manage to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.

Thoreau was in the romantic camp. He says he was a hermit. But he lived a few minutes walk from Concorde, went to town every couple of days and had dinner at his Mom’s house every Sunday.

He thought he was living in the wild. He really believed he was. But we find the idea comical. Nowadays we say “wilderness” we mean those few remaining isolated areas on the planet where man contends with the nature and not the other way round. For Thoreau, and his contemporaries, “the woods” and “the wild” were pretty much anything on the other side of the backyard fence.

Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond—and I think he realized this too—was a thought experiment, the symbolic retreat of the intellectual from society. A gesture. A theoretical possibility. A game. Just like our camping trips, our nature walks, our city parks, our spiritual reconnection with nature. His game, like ours, was a comfortable, bourgeoisie cozying up to the idea of nature, without ever actually confronting nature in its raw form: that is to say, the uncomfortable everpresent possibility of immediate death due to predation, exposure or starvation.

It’s still possible, even today, to live in the woods and be really self-sufficient: if you’re willing to endure near-constant discomfort and the probability of being indifferently and anonymously snuffed. It means walking out your door and not looking back. If you live 5 years, you’ll have done it. After which you’re probably a pretty weird person. Whether you could transition back to society or translate your experiences to the rest of the world would be questionable.

Thoreau’s real lesson is that there is no self-sufficiency. We can live simply, yes. But we can never wander off as isolated individuals completely separate from the world. There is no independence, only interdependence, between people and between people and the natural world. That’s what Thoreau showed and that’s why Walden’s important and the beginning of conservationism and environmentalism and all that stuff.

That’s what I think, at least.

Only three more chapters left, thanks to a lovely reading today outside at the picnic table by the pool.

Some kids came to sit down and hear the ‘story’ as well, but they didn’t stay long. Mid-1850s English is not their cup of tea, no doubt.

We finished half a chapter tonight.

Must do this because I need to free up more space for another goal. Is it good or bad to have more than 43 goals? :)

I plan on one chapter tonight! Must start making some progress here…

...it’s just really hard to get started again. I may have to try again in a couple of years.

i mean start again. because truth is, i’ve started it 4 or 5 times, but i never remember the first part by the time i get back to it…