So someone finally actually read Walden


Never having been able to make it through the book myself, I have to admire Kathryn Schulz, who read the whole thing, and thinks Henry David Thoreau was a wanker. Like Ayn Rand, it’s a mystery how such an obnoxious thinker became so revered.

Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.

Schulz does explain why he’s popular. His nature writing, when not soured with his philosophy, is excellent, and he appeals to something in the American psyche.

Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.

Ah. He was a primordial Republican.

Comments

  1. felicis says

    I remember reading it a couple of years ago – the thing that struck me most was how he hoped to show that ‘anyone’ could do this – he had a little budget worked out and everything… Of course, his budget ignored the price of land (he lived on a friends estate rent free) and labor (while he did scrounge for materials, he also used byproducts of an already existing society – nails, sawn wood, etc..

    A little rich kid taking a year to play at wilderness living in a densely populated area on rent-free land. But thinks he did it all alone with no help from anyone else.

    How could anyone confuse that with the writings of Ayn Rand? ;)

  2. davidnangle says

    One stark difference between Thoreau and modern Republicans: He clearly knew his turds weren’t odorless.

  3. dianne says

    I can’t remember where I heard this (possibly HS English teacher) so take it for what it’s worth, but…note Thoreau’s supposed indifference to worldly issues like where his next meal is coming from? He was said to be very proficient at identifying where someone was baking and begging (or maybe negging) some food off the person (almost always, the woman) who was cooking. This allowed him to claim to be too spiritual to worry about things like cooking or even acquiring food and yet never miss a meal.

  4. steve1 says

    I wonder if Thoreau was a direct descendant of republicans or a republican evolutionary dead end?

  5. says

    PZ:

    Never having been able to make it through the book myself

    I’m glad I’m not the only one. I ended up tossing that mess of a book across the room. A fair number of fierce arguments in my teens was over that idiocy. It seems that in the early 1970s, it was a case of compleat love or compleat hate, and people who loved Walden tended to be obnoxious asses who like to pretend that anyone who didn’t love Walden was simply a low-browed lout with no ability to transcend.

  6. 5Up Mushroom says

    I came to Walden as a kid that read, and completely enjoyed, Jean George’s “My Side of the Mountain” which is like “Walden” for kids, but with more love of nature and independence and less of the frustrating hypocrisy and hateful narcissism (Christianity much, Thoureau?). Anyhow, I enjoyed Walden because of the superb writing, the tranquil descriptions of nature, and the shared love of independence. It’s a great book if you ignore the absurd philosophy that would only work well in Galt’s Gulch. I’ve also made it through Atlas Shrugged and a fair amount of the Bible, so it was a relatively easy read.

  7. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    Having never read Walden [oops], always had the impression he was the primordial hippy, not Rethuglican at all. Maybe it was a Dick Van Dyke movie where he portrayed his philosophy as “the simple life is all one NEEDS”. But then, being a rich kid, bumming overnight sleeps on friends expense, exemplifies hippy lifestyle, does it not? (I also heard he enjoyed some weed at Walden. but dat may be a myth of the “culture” I was part of in the late ’70s)

  8. consciousness razor says

    I’m glad I’m not the only one. I ended up tossing that mess of a book across the room. A fair number of fierce arguments in my teens was over that idiocy. It seems that in the early 1970s, it was a case of compleat love or compleat hate, and people who loved Walden tended to be obnoxious asses who like to pretend that anyone who didn’t love Walden was simply a low-browed lout with no ability to transcend.

    Heh. In the same boat here. It was up there with religion, especially Catholicism in my own case, as some of the first garbage that got my utter contempt as I was growing up. If it was useful to me at all, that was probably because it was filled to the brim with bad ideas. I doubt it’s ever presented that way when it’s part of a school curriculum though.

    I wonder if Thoreau was a direct descendant of republicans or a republican evolutionary dead end?

    Not sure what you’re asking, whether the GOP or republicanism (anti-monarchism and so forth), and you might mean ancestor instead of descendant…. But no. He was a radical libertarian or classical liberal in a lot of ways, but transcendentalism basically turns everything into incoherent mush, if it wasn’t like that to begin with. He is part of the great Incoherent Mush™ tradition of American political, philosophical and literary culture.

  9. Raucous Indignation says

    I made it through the whole book. Thoreau was an entitled classist sexist racist ass who camped out in a cabin in his mom’s backyard when it suited him.

  10. w00dview says

    davidnagle @ 2:

    One stark difference between Thoreau and modern Republicans: He clearly knew his turds weren’t odorless.

    Another difference and his only real good quality: Loved nature and actually thought it was worth protecting. According to the modern GOP, giving a damn about the natural world is killing jobs!!

  11. says

    felicis

    Of course, his budget ignored the price of land (he lived on a friends estate rent free) and labor (while he did scrounge for materials, he also used byproducts of an already existing society – nails, sawn wood, etc..

    That’S the thing that galls me about all those modern day “living without money” and “living in tiny houses” and “look at how simplistic my lifestyle is” people as well: Their whole “simplicity” is possible because of a highly complicated economy. It’S cool is you don’t buy clothing because you only wear stuff that was donated to you, but you still get stuff that was produced by a complex global economy…

  12. Dunc says

    If you’re looking for an alternative to Thoreau, I recommend looking up Aldo Leopold, or Rachel Carson.

    John Muir, perhaps?

  13. yazikus says

    Hah- I’m not the only one! I got to read some of his writing, and Leopold’s, and Carson’s as part of an American Environmental History class (which everyone should have the opportunity to take- it was awesome) and came away with the same impression. “Oh, let me go live in my little cabin a few miles out of town to experience the rugged life! Not too rugged though, i’ll pop into town whenever I need a little social time or anything else!”. It reminded me of the people who throw on a hijab for the day and then claim to be experts at the Muslim experience or something.

  14. inflection says

    I don’t think Thoreau’s motivation in Walden is all that strange. Considering some behaviors meaningless and artificial is an urge that echoes from Holden Caulfield’s rants about phonies to modern claims that “political correctness” is stifling speech, not that I agree with either of those particular examples. An urge to isolate essentials, though, is an abstracting principle that I understand. Now, it happens that Thoreau engaged in his essentializing exercise, got down (correctly!) to the basics of human biology, and instead of accepting his answer seems to have not liked what he found; but that’s a different story.

    There’s a much shorter piece by Thoreau called Civil Disobedience. You might make it through that one. He talks about when it’s justified to break a law. Some of what he says is interesting, but I flat disagree with one of his basic claims, which repelled me so much I can hardly remember the rest of it: he says that the majority rules because it has the physical strength in numbers to impose its will on the minority.

    Even as a child I could realize the flaws in this. If the majority was forced to spend time and energy imposing its will on a resisting minority it wouldn’t have the ability to execute its designs; that can’t be a basis for the democratic system. (This being one of the points that civil disobedience would attempt to exploit, in Thoreau’s explication.)

    Instead, I figure the basic principle of majority rule is faith in humanity, or confidence in human reason: if you ask a bunch of people a question, more likely than not the answer that most of them give is probably the best one. That sits much better with me.

    So, like you, I’m pretty mixed on Thoreau. Interesting elements. Interesting enough that he deserves a place in a well-read education, I think. A critical reading, to be sure.

  15. latveriandiplomat says

    I think like most people, I’ve read excerpts of Walden but not the thing itself, and I always supposed part of the reason for that was that it was wildly uneven, and Schulz seems to confirm that.

    Rand’s writing is never anything but terrible.

    Thoreau being “full of it” about his self-reliance was well known in his own circle. I believe that in addition to living there rent-free, he was a frequent impromptu dinner guest of his neighbors.

    Not knowing the details of his philosophy, and not particularly feeling the need to defend him, I’d still like to point out that at the time he was writing, I believe that charity for the unfortunate was often (usually?) controlled by religious authorities with all the problems that entails, and the federal government was largely a postal service and an army for stealing land from Native Americans and Mexicans. So, skepticism toward both of those things was probably a little more warranted than today.

  16. neverjaunty says

    Thank you for this. I tried to read it after being urged by a friend; said friend got very pissy when I gave up early on, saying the dude came across as a privileged idiot.

    Regarding all those”simplistic living” folks, it’s amazing how much one can get “donated” or “freecycled” when one has similarly privileged friends with an abundance of excess consumer goods.

  17. cartomancer says

    As a non-American I have to say that I was only dimly aware this man ever existed. I’ve come across his name in lists of American writers, and that’s about it. From a quick glance at Wikipedia it seems he influenced Gandhi and certain other early 20th century thinkers. But I think I’m safe in saying that, like Ayn Rand, he has very little place in most people’s consciousness outside the US anymore.

    Probably because of his weirdly American obsession with independence I guess. It never ceases to amaze me how much emphasis so many new world types place on that concept, and how much they tend to denigrate integration into society, cooperation, acknowledgement of others and recognition of one’s dependence on systems entirely beyond one’s influence.

  18. opposablethumbs says

    how much they tend to denigrate integration into society, cooperation, acknowledgement of others and recognition of one’s dependence on systems entirely beyond one’s influence

    This. Which is probably part of the reason I associate this kind of attitude so strongly with sexism; it incorporates so much self-congratulatory machismo (while actually scrounging off the labour of other people who are then smugly despised for not “daring” to be “free”).
    The myth that this is what courage and independence look like: the mainstay of a massive proportion of Hollywood’s output (or am I overgeneralising?)

  19. unclefrogy says

    I also tried to read him but was put off by the back to nature simplicity on the banks of a pond that was in fact commercially harvested for ice and not in untrammeled wild nature, It would have been much easier in his time to have actually gotten away from all the bad stuff of civilization by just walking west. I guess he was a first step someone who wrote about and thought about things in this way but he was just so much of “the Academy” so much a part of the elite and not what my impression of him I had understood from his reputation, he just was to much protestant thinking.
    uncle frogy

  20. newenlightenment says

    the federal government was largely a postal service and an army for stealing land from Native Americans and Mexicans. So, skepticism toward both of those things was probably a little more warranted than today.

    Indeed, in Rand’s day the government boosted the economy through the New Deal and provided a basic level of welfare through social security, at least when it wasn’t busy interning Japanese-American citizens, nuking and carpet bombing cities, enforcing segregation, hounding suspected communists and experimenting with mild versions of eugenics. Rand largely confined her ‘anti-government’ stance to opposition to the first two roles of government. In Thoreau’s day the government largely confined itself to invading Mexico, exterminating native Americans and upholding slavery, all things Thoreau opposed. Whatever the deficiencies of his philosophy its grossly unfair to compare him to Rand.

  21. says

    There’s a much shorter piece by Thoreau called Civil Disobedience. You might make it through that one. He talks about when it’s justified to break a law.

    Ugh. Had to read that one in school. It’s been a long time, but I remember being distinctly unimpressed by it. As I recall, his act of civil disobedience was to refuse to pay his taxes, his justification for which is that he didn’t like (some) things done with his tax dollars. It’s hard to see how you can square this with any kind of coherent political philosophy short of anarchism, except… he thought other things done with his taxes were just fine. Then after being imprisoned for a few days, a rich friend paid his fines and bailed him out.

    Basically, he came off as an entitled, whiny asshole. More like Cliven Bundy than MLK.

  22. methuseus says

    I have been interested in tiny house / simple living types of things for a while. I have never thought of it in the way Thoreau seems to. I can see how it would be nice to not have to work so hard every day just to get stuff that is really not essential to my life, and I have cut some of those things out of mine. maybe the reason I have not been able to achieve something like that is that I did not grow up privileged and have never had the type of friends that I could bum a meal off of at a moment’s notice. It’s not exactly easy to live a somewhat “subsistence” existence, but it is much easier today than it was even 20 years ago due to what the rest of society has contributed. The biggest problem is that we cannot all move to a pseudo subsistence existence because then we will likely have less innovation. I do think, though, that it would be beneficial for everyone to learn how to grow their own vegetables even if they do not grow their own so they understand environmental impacts and that sort of thing.

    I just re-read that and it sounds rambling, but I’m not sure how to say it better. I probably don’t sound a whole lot better than Thoreau.

  23. nutella says

    Two interesting facts about Thoreau:

    He built the cabin at Walden himself but used some materials that he bought from Irish navvies who lived in shacks near the pond while they were building the railroad line that goes across a corner of it. Guides at the site when I was there said, incorrectly, that the railroad line was built after Thoreau left — to support the false impression that the area around the pond was wild country in his time.

    Thoreau presented himself as a great woodsman but was extremely unpopular in Concord after his carelessly set campfire burned many acres of valuable woodland. He was lucky/privileged to escape prosecution for that.

  24. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Free thought, that’s a joke, right?

    Freethought

    Freethought (also formatted free thought) is a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, or other dogmas.

    Freethought doesn’t mean accept any idea just because some said something that sounded authoritative, or history liked it.
    Funny how you cited authority, the antithesis of freethought.

  25. says

    aldebaran @ 34:

    Anyway, those who dislike Thoreau are entitled to their opinion, but many of the sanctimonious idiots here should read this piece before puffing up their combs and strutting much farther:

    Did you bother to click over to the New Yorker and read the article? I’m guessing not, as you don’t seem to want to read anything that might be critical of Thoreau, and boy, is there a lot to be critical about.

  26. Rey Fox says

    Free thought, that’s a joke, right? I’ve rarely read such ovine group-think in all my life.

    *yawn*