#20: A little message from my lord and savior
Henry David Thoreau, that is
It’s that special time in a woman’s life when she’s fresh off reading Henry David Thoreau’s seminal work, Walden, and ready to throw it all away to go live in the woods for a year or two. It was the type of reading experience where you have no choice but to annoy your relations by shrieking with laughter every two minutes and insisting on reading every third paragraph out loud.
I can’t imagine knowing Thoreau in real life, but he’s a treat on the page. Very funny, very sharp, very, very exhausting. I wonder if his family and friends weren’t secretly relieved when he retreated to the woods for a couple years—they most likely yearned for a break from his lectures and philosophies. I enjoy imagining what it would be like to live as Thoreau did, a person who was perhaps too spiritually minded to be of any earthly good. There’s an almost shameful allure about it; the thought of retreating to nature to think only on things that are not of this world.
Of course, you can’t retreat to the woods forever. Jesus went to the desert for forty days, not forty years. But I think something lacking in our culture is the opportunity for lay people to embark on pilgrimages or sabbaticals. To leave the world for a time, and then return to it; there’s something beautiful and sacred about that. It calls for a kind of devotion that is often missing from modern life.
I jotted notes about a few quotes from Walden that were especially rich, but there were many others I could have picked. He has a legendary rant about eating less meat and animal products, for instance. As well as a hilarious rant against doing good: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” My favorite quote is one of the more famous: “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” as well as: “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” and: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” Big if true vibes!
“Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea table chiefly are discussed?”
He said this in relation to the idea that it’s important to guard the sanctity of our minds. On the one hand, this makes me wonder if Thoreau was just not very interested in the minutia of other people’s lives. He did march off to live alone in the woods for two years, after all; although it was his daily habit to walk into the village, and he had a good number of friends, including his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, so he wasn’t a misanthrope by any means. In this context, I believe he was mainly advising caution about admitting too many irrelevant voices into our heads.
Once, one of my older cousins said that high-minded people talk about ideas, and small-minded people talk about people. I thought to myself, well, high-minded people are probably too busy being high-minded to have any friends to talk about. Sometimes the “gossip of the tea table,” or the tiny, trivial details of our lives are the most profound. People are among the most interesting things in the world; I resent the assumption that talking about anything that isn’t religion or politics or literature is somehow trivial. Also, it smacks of sexism; the word gossip is most often used in the context of women’s conversations. I wonder if since the world looks down on anything feminine, our conversations are more likely to be considered mere gossip about trivial affairs? Was Thoreau coming for us?
Yet this quote also brings up an interesting idea that I don’t think we talk about enough. Since the Age of Information, we’ve been swept up in the idea that the more information, the better. We’ve swallowed the promise of the internet; if we can know something, then it’s almost like we think we must know it. Like if there’s information about something then it’s our responsibility as good citizens, feminists, or parents, to know the latest info at all times. However, more knowledge isn’t always useful. There’s a tipping point of information where sometimes, it is better or more useful to know less. As finite human beings, we actually don’t have an unlimited amount of time, attention, and caring to give. If we try to know and care about everything, we get overwhelmed and burned out because it’s an impossible task. Perhaps Thoreau’s point is especially pertinent today, when we’re flooded with constant demands for our attention. Time and attention are the most sacred gifts we have; we should think carefully about where we allocate them.
“Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
If Thoreau was disappointed in a lack of simplicity in the nineteenth century, what in the Sam Hill would he say about the modern world? I think his message stands in direct opposition to the values of modern hustle and productivity culture.
When Thoreau talks about simplifying our lives, he means there is more than one way to make getting a living easier. One way is to desire less, or not satisfy every desire. If our needs and tastes are simple, we will need to work less and make less money to provide for our needs. This rings true because satisfying desire is a never-ending game. The second I get something, even something I’ve wanted for a long time, I want something else. I want something more. This is not just a character flaw, it’s the nature of desire. Desire is bottomless and self-perpetuating. Achieving a desire never means you have one less desire, it means you have more desires.
Also and relatedly, not all problems need to be fixed. Simplifying our lives is the opposite of our growing desire to optimize our lives (which reminds me of this excellent essay by Anne Helen Peterson). In my opinion, the urge to optimize everything is dangerous, and should be treated as an illness. When we try to optimize ourselves and our lives, we become poorer in every sense. There is no such thing as a problem-free life, but there is such a thing as spending all our time and energy working to upgrade every part of our lives, our homes, our families.
“I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.”
The answers I really want have to come from within, from my relationship with my own spirit and God/universe. What would it mean if we learned to look inward, instead of outward?
“Simplify, simplify.” That’s the remedy for our particular sickness, and we need the message more today than when Thoreau was preaching it in the nineteenth century. He went into the woods to see if he couldn’t be happy by stripping away everything the world told him he needed and seeing what life could be, “down to the bone.”
I’m grateful he did. The world will always need prophets and poets, people to show us glimpses of another world. People to show us other ways to live. Often, it feels impossible to change our way of life or mindset because modern life is so precarious. Why risk it? I think it’s important to recognize that our lives are not inevitable. That we are choosing every day to live however we are living. It’s easier to say that my life is good enough for me; I don’t need to change it and if I did need to, it would be too hard. I want to at least recognize that I’m making that choice. We can take responsibility for our own life and choices by rejecting the idea that we’re walking the only road we can walk. We are not.
There are more ways to live than the ways we’ve seen. There’s as many paths as there are people, as many solutions as there are problems. For my part, I want to lean into my Thoreau era a little while, and see where his particular genius for the truth might lead. Out of the woods, I hope.
Thanks for reading! Have a happy week, XOXO Angie
Really loved this one. The quotes you picked out made me laugh.