Henry David Thoreau’s book of wide accord.
Economy
- inquiries from townsmen
- Using the pronoun I
- Inhabitants of Concord doing penance worse than brahmins or hercules
- commentary of young men inheriting farms, houses, etc. and toiling; digging their own graves
- “But men labor under a mistake” they will soon die (Thoreau is existential!)
- Being too occupied with occupation, men cannot pluck the finer fruits of life. Our finest qualities are nurtured through tenderness. But we act like machines with no tenderness
- A paragraph with a very long sentence, poetic, breaks rules (or not), a long line of thought separated by only semi-colons suggesting: a scathing description of civilization swimming in a paddle of the rat race
- Slavery of oneself worst of all slaveries: private opinion is a worst tyrant
- quiet desperation. Wisdom is not desperate
- Men chose the way of life that is common, handed down by old peope. But the lives of old people have been failures: nothing to teach the young.
- It is common belief that everything has been tried went to past generations. Thoreau disagrees: Man has more potential unmeasured.
- Shifts to God lens: talks about light
- “We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!—I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.
- There are many other ways to live
- goes to explain the benefits of living a primitive life in the middle of civilization to learn the gross necessaries of life. Tech has done little to change the essential laws of man’s existence.
- Goes to enumerate the essentials: Food, Shelter, Clothing, Fuel
- Heat
- to keep yourself warm is cheap; People immigrate to other countries for ten or twenty years to live, to keep themselves warm
- The comforta of life are hindrances to the elevation of man; spiritual men are able to do what they do thru voluntary poverty; a discussion of how to truly be a philosopher
- He asks what man will do next after satisfying the essentials. Uses metaphor of seed takin root to shoot upwards toward the sky (similar to Maslow’s Heirarcht of Needs and my Ground Level-Sky Level in LMS or GTD)
- he delineates his audience: those who complain about their current situation as duty and the rich who dont know how to use or get rid of what they have
- Thoreau shares his work history: walking to collect beauty, reporter to a journal, surveyor
- Shares story about a strolling Indian selling baskets; says he too weaves baskets but has not made them worthy of being bought; he studies not how to make them worth buying by others but how to avoid selling them
- Being rejectes by society, he went to the woods where he is more accepted; explains his purpose of going to Walden.
- Likens his work to trading with the Celestial Empire
- Before buying new clothes, aspire to become a new man first
- He likens clothing to the skin of plants and argues that shirts are the most vital of all clothing. Without it, the man is destroyed; aspire for simple clothing and clothes that last a lifetime
- Shares how difficult it is to find simple clothing because of the dictates of Fashion, authority of which comes from Paris
- fashion follows the new keeps on changing whimsically; compares it with tattooing that doesn’t change
- fashion is not meant to cloth people but to make people rich
Others
The ultimate goal of the author’s experiment at Walden is not to prove the economic advantage of living simply, but rather to nurture understanding of self and of the universe.
References
Gessner, D. (2004). Sick of nature. The Boston Globe. http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/08/01/sick_of_nature?pg=full “By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really ‘nature writing’ anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau’s] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There’s something to celebrate.”