Last year was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and prompted a lot of performances of his works to commemorate the occasion. This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of a great American writer, and one can only hope it will be marked by appropriate observances.
Since the character in question is Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), doing homage could entail anything from observing nature closely to saving the planet to rejecting all conventional wisdom to simplifying one’s life to getting tossed into the clink for sticking to one’s principles unswervingly.
Thoreau was a small town boy whose mind ranged widely, allowing him to boast that he had “traveled a good deal in Concord.” His pages are filled with allusions to Hindu scripture, Greek and Roman literature and mythology, impractical poets and down to earth economists. He was a school teacher, a pencil maker, a poet, polemicist, naturalist, iconoclast, and contrarian.
He was not as dreamy as his fellow transcendentalists, but rather highly critical of his fellow Yankees and their calvinist dedication to the profit motive and self-abnegating labor. He surely seemed to many of his contemporaries an eccentric or a crank, but he had older models than theirs in mind for the good life. He is an American Diogenes the Cynic. When Alexander the Great, an admirer, asked what he could do for him Diogenes said Alexander could get out of his light. Thoreau also had a kinship with the Socrates who, when he paused to look at the bustling commercial Agora, said with amazement; “So many things I don’t want.”
Thoreau’s nature writings are notable for their close observation rather than for their romantic sentiment. He lived long enough to read Darwin and approve the insights of “Origin of Species.” In a later time he would surely have been a life scientist. Many who followed him are in his debt as their prose sometimes shows. Loren Eiseley, E.O. Wilson, Earth Day founders, Green Peace activists, Zen men like Alan Watts and Gary Snyder, and climate scientists are all Thoreau’s children.
“Walden” is a philosopher’s rejection of one way of life and a recommendation of another. It shares Wordsworth’s contempt for mere materialism, “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Instead, it proposes an experiment in simple, contemplative living rather than “making yourself sick that you may lay of something against a sick day,” Still, Thoreau is sufficiently a canny Yankee to include a balance sheet of his income and expenses. Or is he mocking his neighbors’ way of toting up the world yet again?
Out of “Walden” have come crowds of acolytes over the years including various Utopian communities, the “Five Acres and Independence,” “Owner Built Home,” “Whole Earth Catalog,” homespun crowd, and every sort of dissenter from hippies to survivalists. Whether he would have embraced them as brothers or scorned them as dabblers is anybody’s guess. He was probably happiest as a counterculture of one.
In “Civil Disobedience” he created a template for seeking political change. He was an abolitionist who thought a tax to pay for the Mexican War made him complicit in supporting slavery. So he refused to pay and ended up in jail, until his aunt paid to spring him. Purists think this was hypocritical; he should have remained locked up. But even his illustrious followers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t mistake jail as an end, but rather the price of protest or a means to the end. Those inspired by his willingness to make an issue of cooperating with a corrupt government are still legion.
He may have been an idealist, but he was a hard-headed one. “Unjust laws exist. Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” His answer was, “Under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.”
Of course, Thoreau was first and foremost a beautiful writer, at his best when he was tilting at windmills and exposing the faulty logic and absurd premises of his foes. In this sense he is a descendent of Swift and the precursor of Mark Twain, George Carlin and Mort Sahl. You wouldn’t expect works about building a cabin in the woods or protesting taxation to be funny and satiric, but they are. And filled with endless quotable passages. And so, I quote.
“If we read of one man robbed or murdered or one house burned down or one vessel wrecked…we never need read of another. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances?…To a philosopher all news is gossip.”
He is amused by the irony of a “student of political economy” who “while reading Adam Smith, Ricardo and Say runs his father irretrievably into debt.” And by the fact that most of us “have not delved six feet beneath the surface of the globe on which we live nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Besides, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise.”
“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.”
“Simplify. Simplify. Instead of three meals, one, a hundred dishes, five.”
“Slavery is bad, but worse to be a slave-driver of yourself.”:
“What my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad.”
“”One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument.”
Thoreau was an American original, still going strong 200 years later, and capable of inspiring admiration and amusement, worthy of celebration, if not always of emulation. Especially in a season when we have an emperor who is as far from a naturalist, a moralist or a minimalist as possible. Who better to remind us that most emperors are wearing no clothes or, if they are, probably overpaid for the outfit. After all , it was Thoreau who warned us to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”