[Walden] is more revered than read, so it exists for most people only as a dim impression retained from adolescence or as the source of a few famous lines: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
Extracted from their contexts, such declarations read like the text on inspirational posters or quote-a-day calendars—purposes to which they are routinely put. Together with the bare facts of the retreat at Walden, those lines have become the ones by which we adumbrate Thoreau, so that our image of the man has also become simplified and inspirational. In that image, Thoreau is our national conscience: the voice in the American wilderness, urging us to be true to ourselves and to live in harmony with nature.
This vision cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.” The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling.
Monday, July 04, 2016
Pissing on Thoreau
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Somebody posted a link to this article on this blog when the article first appeared last October.
ReplyDeleteHaving read it, I must say that the author did Thoreau the justice of reading him, which many of his admirers clearly have skipped. It seemed to me on reading Walden for the first time (about 30 years after it was assigned in school), that his popularity during the 1960s could be explained only by an inability of most of the readership to understand what was before them on the page.
If a cause for sainthood were going forward, Ms. Schulz would be unanswerable as the devil's advocate; the proponents would have throw in their hands. But if the controversy concerns Thoreau's standing as a great writer, then I don't think that she has really hurt him. Robert Louis Stevenson and Jacques Barzun have made cooler estimates of his strengths and weaknesses. I wouldn't wish to live in a world arranged according to Thoreau's rules. Yet I could fill my garage with randomly chosen issues of The New Yorker before I found matter to outweigh The Maine Woods or A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers