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South Park somehow leads me to my favorite books. (Which scares me, because I'm actually planning to read Atlas Shrugged.) I found my favorite book, Great Expectations because I liked the show's Pip character. And now, through Eric Cartman's plagiarism, Walden.
Well, sort of. I was exposed to Walden in school. Specifically, English Honors II, i.e. the worst English class ever. Our teacher was a nightmare. She thrived on pop quizzes which would ask the most OBSCURE questions so we wouldn't use the Cliff Notes and also asked questions about interpretation of metaphors and expecting us to instinctively know the most common interpretation without first discussing it in class. (Like "Who are the Mockingbirds in To Kill a Mockingbird?") It put me in a real prejudice against American literature. Even recently I've said stuff like "I don't think American literature got good until the early 20th century. Although I don't like him, Mark Twain was a step in the right direction and at least got the Puritan stick out of America's butt." As I keep thinking up exceptions to this rule, I think I might have been too hasty. But this at least puts you in the mind I was in during this class.
I hated the excerpts of Walden I had to read. I thought they were boring, ponderous, digressive and thought Thoreau was a quack. Especially when we had to read the segment on the ant battle. Also, like many students, I felt there was a hypocrisy in claiming "Simplify, simplify, simplify" when you have paragraphs that go on for two pages.
I can't remember what made me think I should give the book another chance. Maybe it was that my Dad came to me after reading Moby-Dick (another book I hated in the segments) and talked about how much he missed in the abridged version he read as a kid. He told me about how the book described whaling and how the sailors had to actually cut pieces off the whale and do it in a certain amount of time before the boat sank and how much work went into just preparing the whale after spending so long catching it and I thought, "Wow, if they told me THAT was in Moby-Dick I would have been more encouraged to read it."
So I borrowed Dad's copy of Moby-Dick (still unread ... d'oh) and put Walden on my wishlist, not expecting too much or even planning to buy it that soon. My co-worker eventually found the wishlist and bought Walden for my last birthday. And now here I am.
I'm so glad she bought me the book. Walden still has its digressions and blocks of paragraphs and description of the ant war but ... either my growth or my seeing it in full has turned Thoreau from an eccentric quack intro the greatest pose-poet I ever read. W.E.B. du Bois came close in The Souls of Black Folk. Like du Bois, Thoreau blends factual observations, figures, facts and history but injects them with an art and life so that an ordinary object, like a speck of dust or a baby looks more beautiful than the best painting. In truth, Souls is better written and more important book. du Bois shows greater understanding of many types of people and Thoreau can only see people like him. (According to John Updike's intro, E.B. White loved Thoreau but felt Walden was written only for those who are male, unmarried and had a benefactor.) But Thoreau is unmatched for the open-hearted beauty he has for the world.
Of course, because of his circumstances du Bois had little reason for that kind of optimism. Most of us don't. Yet I can't help but be attracted to it. My favorite poet is John Keats, who loved everything, and I sometimes cynically wonder if he loved everything because he never grew old enough to do so. But now I'm digressing.
There's no way to talk about Walden and also make it sound attractive. Thoreau is a naturalist, and he sometimes gets lost talking about things like the degrees of the water and the measuring of the pond. Thoreau is a practical man, and sometimes he'll tell you about the best way to plow his bean field and how much everything in his house costs. But Thoreau is also a philosopher and a transcendentalist, so he'll always describe everything he does and sees and has that rare quality of imparting all of his feelings as he does it. When I read this book I felt like I was right at Thoreau's side. And as he laid on the surface of a frozen pond and surveyed the crystalline bubbles or chased after a loon in his boat or awoke to the sound of a railroad and made every action seem beautiful and wonderful and perfect I felt like all I could do was just end his every sentence with "Wow." As in, " 'Simplify, simplify, simplify' ... 'wow.' "
Walden is what everyone thinks it is. It's the story of a man living on his own in the woods. But many people think Walden is also other things which it is not. One is that Walden is communistic. No. Walden is anti-materialistic, sure, but he doesn't want to tear down the current world and replace it with a new one in which we're all dolled out new jobs by a leader. In Walden you live to your simplest means and you live as much as you can for yourself. There's no separation of tasks by others. Walden is all about individualism.
But Walden is also NOT about scorning humanity. Humans aren't the problem. It's the hamster wheel we're running on which has us buy a house to go to work which we then have to pay off by going to work which we wouldn't have needed to do if we didn't need the house ... to work. My teacher told me Thoreau left Walden Pond because he was lonely. Totally wrong. He lived a mile away from a village. One whole chapter is devoted to his visits to the village and many people came to visit him. (Some even hung out at his house when he wasn't around. Yeah, things were stolen but he didn't have a whole lot of nice things so he didn't care.) He left because he felt like he was falling into another routine, on another hamster wheel, maybe.
Walden is idealistic but grounds the spiritual in reality. Thoreau had an omnivorous spirituality. He references the Bible but also the Hinduism and makes reference to Gods from multiple mythologies. He sees no conflict. He admired The Origin of the Species but Updike said was unconcerned about the Biblical debate surrounding it. Why should he be? As he said at one point in Walden, nature has one law and naturalists just keep trying to understand it, citing anomalies when things don't work to the theories. I think Thoreau knew we'd just keep searching for the truth and reality. He might have even said so ...
I couldn't do Walden. Perhaps I could. Perhaps I'd like to, at least for a time. Despite White's claim and the mostly male pronouns I didn't feel left out of the book. Unmarried women are on the hamster wheel just like unmarried men are. In fact, women have had their own hamster wheels. I think if a woman wanted to do Walden she could, although she would have to be as talented as Thoreau is and might have her own concerns. I don't know if she could do it married, or with a family. (Although Walden by a single mother might be fascinating, especially in our age of child-proofing. Walden 1 and 1/2?) But I still don't think I'd have the courage or drive to do Walden.
That's probably a bad thing. Throughout the book, Walden encourages us to live and live life to the fullest and not just float along with it or run on the wheel. We don't have to live in the woods ... Thoreau eventually left because it became routine. Do we live our full lives? I don't think I do. Do you?
It's something to think about. Hard.
Well, sort of. I was exposed to Walden in school. Specifically, English Honors II, i.e. the worst English class ever. Our teacher was a nightmare. She thrived on pop quizzes which would ask the most OBSCURE questions so we wouldn't use the Cliff Notes and also asked questions about interpretation of metaphors and expecting us to instinctively know the most common interpretation without first discussing it in class. (Like "Who are the Mockingbirds in To Kill a Mockingbird?") It put me in a real prejudice against American literature. Even recently I've said stuff like "I don't think American literature got good until the early 20th century. Although I don't like him, Mark Twain was a step in the right direction and at least got the Puritan stick out of America's butt." As I keep thinking up exceptions to this rule, I think I might have been too hasty. But this at least puts you in the mind I was in during this class.
I hated the excerpts of Walden I had to read. I thought they were boring, ponderous, digressive and thought Thoreau was a quack. Especially when we had to read the segment on the ant battle. Also, like many students, I felt there was a hypocrisy in claiming "Simplify, simplify, simplify" when you have paragraphs that go on for two pages.
I can't remember what made me think I should give the book another chance. Maybe it was that my Dad came to me after reading Moby-Dick (another book I hated in the segments) and talked about how much he missed in the abridged version he read as a kid. He told me about how the book described whaling and how the sailors had to actually cut pieces off the whale and do it in a certain amount of time before the boat sank and how much work went into just preparing the whale after spending so long catching it and I thought, "Wow, if they told me THAT was in Moby-Dick I would have been more encouraged to read it."
So I borrowed Dad's copy of Moby-Dick (still unread ... d'oh) and put Walden on my wishlist, not expecting too much or even planning to buy it that soon. My co-worker eventually found the wishlist and bought Walden for my last birthday. And now here I am.
I'm so glad she bought me the book. Walden still has its digressions and blocks of paragraphs and description of the ant war but ... either my growth or my seeing it in full has turned Thoreau from an eccentric quack intro the greatest pose-poet I ever read. W.E.B. du Bois came close in The Souls of Black Folk. Like du Bois, Thoreau blends factual observations, figures, facts and history but injects them with an art and life so that an ordinary object, like a speck of dust or a baby looks more beautiful than the best painting. In truth, Souls is better written and more important book. du Bois shows greater understanding of many types of people and Thoreau can only see people like him. (According to John Updike's intro, E.B. White loved Thoreau but felt Walden was written only for those who are male, unmarried and had a benefactor.) But Thoreau is unmatched for the open-hearted beauty he has for the world.
Of course, because of his circumstances du Bois had little reason for that kind of optimism. Most of us don't. Yet I can't help but be attracted to it. My favorite poet is John Keats, who loved everything, and I sometimes cynically wonder if he loved everything because he never grew old enough to do so. But now I'm digressing.
There's no way to talk about Walden and also make it sound attractive. Thoreau is a naturalist, and he sometimes gets lost talking about things like the degrees of the water and the measuring of the pond. Thoreau is a practical man, and sometimes he'll tell you about the best way to plow his bean field and how much everything in his house costs. But Thoreau is also a philosopher and a transcendentalist, so he'll always describe everything he does and sees and has that rare quality of imparting all of his feelings as he does it. When I read this book I felt like I was right at Thoreau's side. And as he laid on the surface of a frozen pond and surveyed the crystalline bubbles or chased after a loon in his boat or awoke to the sound of a railroad and made every action seem beautiful and wonderful and perfect I felt like all I could do was just end his every sentence with "Wow." As in, " 'Simplify, simplify, simplify' ... 'wow.' "
Walden is what everyone thinks it is. It's the story of a man living on his own in the woods. But many people think Walden is also other things which it is not. One is that Walden is communistic. No. Walden is anti-materialistic, sure, but he doesn't want to tear down the current world and replace it with a new one in which we're all dolled out new jobs by a leader. In Walden you live to your simplest means and you live as much as you can for yourself. There's no separation of tasks by others. Walden is all about individualism.
But Walden is also NOT about scorning humanity. Humans aren't the problem. It's the hamster wheel we're running on which has us buy a house to go to work which we then have to pay off by going to work which we wouldn't have needed to do if we didn't need the house ... to work. My teacher told me Thoreau left Walden Pond because he was lonely. Totally wrong. He lived a mile away from a village. One whole chapter is devoted to his visits to the village and many people came to visit him. (Some even hung out at his house when he wasn't around. Yeah, things were stolen but he didn't have a whole lot of nice things so he didn't care.) He left because he felt like he was falling into another routine, on another hamster wheel, maybe.
Walden is idealistic but grounds the spiritual in reality. Thoreau had an omnivorous spirituality. He references the Bible but also the Hinduism and makes reference to Gods from multiple mythologies. He sees no conflict. He admired The Origin of the Species but Updike said was unconcerned about the Biblical debate surrounding it. Why should he be? As he said at one point in Walden, nature has one law and naturalists just keep trying to understand it, citing anomalies when things don't work to the theories. I think Thoreau knew we'd just keep searching for the truth and reality. He might have even said so ...
I couldn't do Walden. Perhaps I could. Perhaps I'd like to, at least for a time. Despite White's claim and the mostly male pronouns I didn't feel left out of the book. Unmarried women are on the hamster wheel just like unmarried men are. In fact, women have had their own hamster wheels. I think if a woman wanted to do Walden she could, although she would have to be as talented as Thoreau is and might have her own concerns. I don't know if she could do it married, or with a family. (Although Walden by a single mother might be fascinating, especially in our age of child-proofing. Walden 1 and 1/2?) But I still don't think I'd have the courage or drive to do Walden.
That's probably a bad thing. Throughout the book, Walden encourages us to live and live life to the fullest and not just float along with it or run on the wheel. We don't have to live in the woods ... Thoreau eventually left because it became routine. Do we live our full lives? I don't think I do. Do you?
It's something to think about. Hard.
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(Answering both posts here)
I haven't gotten to "Civil Disobedience" and if I read "Self-Reliance" it was a long time ago. I'm planning on getting an Essential Writings on Emerson and a book of Thoreau's essays, though. So I'll get back to you when I've read the two.
Hmm ... I'm of two minds about the pitfalls of being awake all the time. On the one hand, easy activities with a low level of thought can bring their own kind of fun and the brain sometimes needs to shut down and relax. When really bad things happen it's also easy to shut down. On the other hand, you live in the grind so long that missing out on those times of relaxation don't seem so bad.
But then again, this may be all moot because doing it all the time may be an impossibility. I think just trying to do your best when it comes to this is the smartest idea. Even a little living is better than nothing, I think.