national simplicity day

Thoreau, Volume 2: Still Sh*tty After All These Years

I had a pretty good idea when I penned Henry David Thoreau: Beloved Bullshit Artist in 2017 for Worldwide Weird Holidays that few would care. But those who did take notice also took umbrage. Some were angry I’d devalued their Thoreau memes, as if such a thing were possible. Another felt I’d insulted the grandchildren who’d gifted her a mug bearing a famous quotation.

Author on Walden Pond

trying to undo the damage

Last year, during a visit to Walden Pond arranged by my brother, he questioned the basis for the intensity of my disdain for Thoreau as I mused about knocking over a cairn carefully arranged by devotees. It’s true that the loudness of my opinion can be inversely proportional to my level of knowledge of the subject at hand. So, I decided to search for sources, verifiable ones, beyond my fevered English-majorette’s brain. Apparently, my penance for disliking Thoreau is reading scads of writing by and about him in order to support my view.

I should explain this photo. I did end up accidentally knocking some loose stones off the top of a cairn while hamming it up for the camera. In my defense, that particular cairn was anchored to a rock at the water’s edge to provide a photo op for visitors; I didn’t know that someone had balanced pebbles on top of it. My brother was highly amused and snapped a whole series of pics documenting my futile attempts to put them back. I’m pretty sure I felt worse about that than Thoreau did about burning down the woods.

You read that right. A year before his stay in the woods, Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire while cooking his day’s catch. It burned 300 acres according to the May 3, 1844, issue of the Concord Freeman newspaper. Six years later, in an entry that would later be published in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, he admitted to setting the fire for which he was widely reviled by area residents while still managing to absolve himself of all responsibility.

I said to myself, “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.” It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. (The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still.) So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it.

That’s quite a rationalization for the man who would become a hero to conservationists everywhere. This is what he wrote in the aftermath of an 1849 shipwreck that washed up, by his account, 28 or 30 bodies of Irish men, women, and children who had emigrated in hopes of a new life. This passage is taken from Entry I of Cape Cod.

On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time in awe or pity? If the last day were come, we should not think so much about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to the common lot of humanity.

In Walden, Thoreau extolled the virtues of a simple existence. Had he lived his whole life in a tiny house, I might find his philosophizing more believable. (According to The Walden Woods Project, he lived there for two years, two months, and two days.) Had he not lived within walking distance of his parents’ house, which he visited several times a week, or had his mother and sisters visit weekly to bring him food, clean his cabin and wash his clothes, I might find his exhortations more sincere. As Kathryn Schulz writes in The New Yorker:

The hypocrisy is not that Thoreau aspired to solitude and self-sufficiency but kept going home for cookies and company. That’s just the gap between aspiration and execution, plus the variability in our needs and moods from one moment to the next—eminently human experiences, which, had Thoreau engaged with them, would have made for a far more interesting and useful book. The hypocrisy is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one. Worse, he preached at others to live as he did not, while berating them for their own compromises and complexities.

Garrison Keillor called Thoreau “a sorehead and loner whose clunky line about marching to your own drummer has found its way into a million graduation speeches. Thoreau tried to make a virtue out of lack of rhythm. He said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. OK, but how did he know? He didn’t talk to that many people. He wrote elegantly about independence and forgot to thank his mom for doing his laundry.”

Finally, let me quote my original post about Thoreau:

Exhortations to simplify one’s life can be helpful, but they often mask disdain and smug superiority. Thoreau reminds us of the intrepid explorer in a documentary, ostensibly forging a path trodden moments before by the cameraman walking backward in front of him.

Thoreau Quote mug Magick Sandwich

not a great  mug

Who needs Thoreau for inspiration? My quotation probably wouldn’t fit so well on a mug, though.

By the way, if you’re interested in doing your own research, the works by Thoreau I’ve cited here and 18 others are available for free via Project Gutenberg.

I recommend reading At Walden, Thoreau Wasn’t Really Alone With Nature, a New York Times piece that provides a different perspective of Walden and the freed slaves and other “untouchables” who had no choice but to make their home there.

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Magick Sandwich

Henry David Thoreau, Beloved Bullsh*t Artist

national simplicity dayToday is the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth on July 12, 1817. The fondness and nostalgia his name evokes are undeniable. National Simplicity Day was created many years ago to commemorate his birthday each year.

But romantic notions of Thoreau’s retreat into nature don’t stand up to scrutiny. While his conclusions may be valid, his description of the circumstances which led to them is demonstrably false.

The James Frey of his time, Thoreau passed off fiction as memoir. Unlike Frey, he was never called to account by the 17th-century equivalent of Oprah.

Henry David Thoreau, author, ersatz ascetic, armchair philosopher and navel-gazing misanthrope, was a consummate bullshit artist.  Here’s what led us to this unpopular opinion.

Thoreau famously went to live in a cabin in the woods, the better to ponder life without the inconvenience of other people and the irritations of everyday, well, life.

In Walden: or, A Life in the Woods, he wrote, “I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

Thoreau certainly could turn a phrase; many of them clog the arteries of inspirational sites and satisfy the sweet tooth of quote-mongers who reverently offer them up on posters, mousepads and coffee mugs.

He neglected to mention that the area was bustling with people year-round. A commuter train passed nearby. He hosted parties. He lived a twenty-minute walk from his parent’s house and made the trip several times a week to enjoy his mother’s cooking.

The man who advised his readers to eat only one meal a day to avoid indulging base appetites was visited by his mother and sisters at least once a week to bring him food, tidy up the cabin and clean his laundry.

Exhortations to simplify one’s life can be helpful, but they often mask disdain and smug superiority. Thoreau reminds us of the intrepid explorer in a documentary, ostensibly forging a path trodden moments before by the cameraman walking backward in front of him.

Have a happy National Simplicity Day but if you can’t keep it simple, don’t worry: you’re in good company.

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Let’s All Shut Up About September 11th

I can’t wait for September 12th. Why? Not because I fear an attack on the 11th but because I just want everyone to shut up about it.

There’s something unseemly about the orgy of coverage surrounding the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack. On one level, we deal with the chilling knowledge that we are not safe. Maybe we know somebody who died. Maybe we know somebody who got lucky. Maybe we know somebody who knows somebody. Or we got upset watching it on TV. We all own this experience, at least in our minds.

But before we play “where were you when _____,” let me just say that I am not up for that particular game. Yes, this is a defining moment in modern history, “our” Pearl Harbor, “our” JFK assassination. But it is also defined by this modern age of reality programming and 24-hour news cycles. We would never have seen Walter Cronkite chasing down everyone who had ever been to Dealey Plaza to get their input.

Disaster porn is profitable. Reporters in the field seem to get paid by the tear, as evidenced by a recent CNN interview with a woman whose house had been destroyed by a Texas wildfire.  She was understandably terse, distracted by the sight of her home’s charred remains. The reporter tried to draw her out by asking, “How does this make you feel?” The woman stared at the reporter for a long moment before replying, “I’ve lost everything!” The “what kind of a stupid question is that?” was implied. I assume the people who express that aloud get edited out.

There is also the phenomenon of what I would call Chicken Little Syndrome. CNN coverage of the East Coast earthquake took an absurd turn when the worst thing found was a crack in the Washington Monument. So they covered it for days. That, and some bricks that fell on a car in Virginia. By the time Hurricane Irene started to look like it was headed straight through Central Park, a lot of people thought it was just more hype and didn’t pay attention.

Now the dedication of the September 11 Memorial will be taking place and there’s a “credible threat” of a terrorist attack. Well, duh! Of course, they’d love to let us know we haven’t cut off the head of the snake. Speaking of bin Laden, wasn’t the jubilation a little distasteful, after the moral outrage at al-Qaeda celebrating when the planes hit? I am grateful he’s gone but it’s hard to claim the high ground when we’re jumping up and down about a person, even a villain, being killed.

Networks make money on this. Do we share responsibility for that? Why do we watch? Is there some perverse pleasure in the celebration–sorry, commemoration–of awful events? There are people who suffered and died that day. Most of us were not touched by this tragedy in a purely factual, physically actual way. Why must we lay claim? Have we become a nation of professional mourners? Why can’t we acknowledge this sad anniversary without total media sensory immersion?

It was nice back then when people rallied around the city, proclaiming “we are all New Yorkers.” But we’re not. Visited here once? Saw a movie with the Towers in it? Worried about Homeland Security threat levels in Gary, Indiana? Sorry, thanks for playing. New Yorkers, and I’m proud to be one, will do what they’ve always done. Get up, go to work–orange, yellow, puce alert–doesn’t matter. We remember the fires, the smell, the subway walls covered with signs searching for loved ones that were surely dead. I spent hours thinking I’d lost my husband–he was supposed to be there–but he ran late. We were lucky on a day so many people weren’t.

No offense, but I don’t need anyone to remind me of this. I certainly don’t need Wolf Blitzer “catastrobating,” a term my brother-in-law coined that perfectly captures the breathless reportage that will hopefully climax and enjoy a cigarette on the 12th. That will be the day I can watch the news again, the day I’ll stop getting email ads for The New Yorker’s 9/11 e-book and the day the History Channel will return to its regularly scheduled Hitler-related programming. That sounds like a good day to me.

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