agreed, agreed, agreed
3 Likes
Yes. As Jedediah Purdy adds in a defense of Thoreau,
When Thoreau disdained Europe and claimed that most of the phenomena reported by Arctic explorers could be observed in Concord, he was expressing his universalism, and his belief that consciousness was all. Take a blunt mind to the ends of the earth, and you might as well be at home. Take a keen and receptive mind to a worked-over pond near a railroad track, or to a melting mud-slope, and you will see the universe.
8 Likes
You can do the same in Fallout 4 - Thoreau’s cabin is actually in the game - except with guns. Lots of guns.
2 Likes
This quote is a beauty, and good article. One of my faves, direct from the man himself:
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
I don’t idolize Thoreau. I found him pretty airy. But he has a few good nuggets, and what I liked about him most from my youth was his hands-on approach to rigging up his life. Just trying stuff. And then my friend came along and showed me all his contraptions to deal with country life. So, I picked it up.
When I renovated my laundry room, I still had laundry to do, so I put the washer and dryer outside and ran an extension cord and the garden hose. Another friend remarked, why that is a very yankee solution to that problem.
Another year, after carrying wood manually in through the back door and getting wood bits everywhere, I had had enough. So I cut a 12x14 inch hole in the back of my house with a sawzall, made a little latching door, and built a ramp to the wood pile in the utility closet. No more wood bits in the living room. Simply shove all the wood in the hole at the back of the house. And other such riggings. No need to get all airy about it.
When life hands you massive struggle, use your mind to come up with ways to be lazy, so there’s more time for the fun stuff like wasting it on Facebook and BB BBS.
2 Likes
My problem isn’t with Thoreau, he was open about what he was doing and said that if help was offered you shouldn’t turn it down. It’s with the rugged individualist types who refer to Walden without having actually read the book properly.
My comments probably seems like misdirected snark though.
1 Like
2 Likes
It’s not very transcendental or Thoreauesque if it only runs on proprietary OSes.
And how are you going to find peace when you’ve got Microsoft breathing down your neck whenever your computer is on?
2 Likes
and bookmarks link
That’s just the “life of quiet desperation” feature kicking in. Enjoy the verisimilitude! How many frames per second do you get?
2 Likes
Thank you for your account of your Thoreauvian experiences. Fascinating stuff. Plus, I think you turned the conversation here in a very productive direction. So, kudos on both fronts!
2 Likes
It’s something I put in the category of “useful myth”. Striving for self-sufficiency and individualism often results in realizing that one is more resourceful and capable of achieving more than one might have given oneself (or been given by others) credit for. It helps one feel like one can take control of one’s life instead of being at the mercy of others. And being able to take care of oneself allows one to have more to offer others, to give more than receive. I think of it on the same terms as one’s emotional life- insecure people tend to act self-centeredly, and as one works on becoming more secure and self-confident, one gradually realizes that it’s not all about you, and it’s easier to give freely. Both emotionally and materially, if you are confident that you can take care of yourself, you will have the confidence to go out on a limb to help others. And I’m not sure the charge of denial of collective action sticks; the issue isn’t collective action, it’s with the arena in which collective action takes place. Even die hard libertarians value the importance of community, trade, comparative advantage- the difference is that it is preferred in the voluntary realm rather than government.
Yes, it can be oversold, but like with the Protestant Work Ethic or the myth of meritocracy (all things that occasionally get bashed around here), we shouldn’t let the fact that people sometimes misapply it cause us to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes the narrative might be a myth, but sometimes it’s a myth worth trying to live up to.
One of the things that I liked about Walden Pond was the notion of routing around; he explicitly rejected going into debt for a house, he thought, maybe I can find a way around that - which resonates with issues today involving home ownership, higher education, and starting a business. As other people have said here, question the “normal” path of living- you might find that for you, as an individual, there is a different way.
My other comment about charges of shallow environmentalism is that in the context of the time, it was kind of a big shift in thinking. The idea of preserving nature and appreciating it hadn’t really been a thing for very long before that. Despite his imperfections, we needed people like him inspiring others to reach modern environmental consciousness.
I read a moderate amount; back when he was on the syllabus; admittedly some time ago, as we didn’t really get along all that well.
As for the ‘to which he feels entitled’ bit specifically; I do stand by that one. The aspect of his work that I most liked were the bits where he stopped going for the killer aphorism for a bit and examined the actual costs and actual value of various things(railroads being the famous non-favorite); so it’s hardly as though logistical tallying was something he just didn’t do as a matter of course; it’s something he did do, sometimes what he was directly focused on, except when it came to a pretty substantial part of his own adventure; which he passed over in silence.
It’s all pretty low on the global list of grievous historical sins; but the “I’m going to tot up all the underacknowledge costs of the alleged convenience of rail travel; and completely ignore the domestic labor subsidies afforded to living deliberately” thing was both un-endearing and a trifle suggestive of the (not even remotely uncommon) tendency to treat labor with market value as real and nonmarket domestic labor as just background noise.
I mean, I was just being snarky, but FWIW I was raised UU- we always make fun of ourselves, the pillars of our tradition not excluded.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
