Thoreau, You Make Me Nervous

Do you ever get stuck in a book for fear of betrayal? The writer makes a foray onto some foreboding cliff where you, the reader, are hesitant to follow. So you shut the book and refuse to open it for fear the writer will take the dive, all the while knowing he well may continue to appease. I keep having this experience as I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

Thoreau, you make me nervous. I want to love you so badly, but I fear the next paragraph will get too far into economics and we’ll be over. I keep putting you down, and strangely I don’t pick anything else back up except you in another few days. It’s funny I haven’t yet learned to trust you, but you write with such authority (and probably would condemn our modern accommodating style) that I tread carefully through your words (as intended). So far, all you’ve built is admiration, and I enjoy reading critically even if it does make the going all the slower.

Naturally, I’m loving Walden. I don’t know why I’ve never read it, but now is perfect. I spent a lot of my summer exploring the outdoors from my second home and feeling very Walden (even if I didn’t know exactly what that was). I finished Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums earlier this year, so I did have a keen sense of fraternity in step with Kerouac’s lightweight rucksack expedition to Matterhorn Peak and his wild love for Desolation Peak. I much prefer camping in the woods or on the beach to spending a weekend indoors or at the bar. I wish it were every day I scaled Mount Washington (the long, hard way). I’m in love with our national parks.

At the top!

I leave you with some Kerouac:

There was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television, each living family riveting its attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards; dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels. You’ll see what I mean, when it begins to appear like everybody in the world is soon going to be thinking the same way and the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips. Only one thing I’ll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they’re not hurting anyone while they’re sitting in front of that Eye. But neither was Japhy … I see him in future years stalking along with full rucksack, in suburban streets, passing the blue television windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the Master Switch.

… the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures …

And a little Thoreau:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.