I originally read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden when I was about 25 years old. At that time I was so heavily invested in the consumer lifestyle that I was thinking about buying a luxury automobile. Walden made me strongly reconsider that notion, using sound arguments to put me on a minimalist and nomadic path that I’ve sustained since then. I recently re-read the book to see if there was anything I missed the first time around or if my beliefs have changed in the previous decade.
One thing that immediately struck me in my second reading is an arrogance that borders on egomaniacal delusion. He started writing Walden in his late 20’s, yet his tone is one of absolute certainty in finding an obviously superior lifestyle (one that he never re-attempted after the book was published).
Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.
Can you imagine a young man coming up to you and saying that his elders have absolutely nothing of use to say? You’d probably tell him to go right back to the cabin he is living in, and I’m sure many people actually did just that, and yet not even two pages after the above passage he cites a quote from Confucius that actually condemns his own behavior: “To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” Unless you lived life exactly as he prescribed, you were some kind of fool or peasant, but only the life he himself role-played for not more than two years.
In Walden, Thoreau used an extended camping trip as a device to push individualist notions of the Enlightenment age to browbeat people into living his lifestyle. It’s no surprise that he was not well-liked by his peers, though if you put his arrogance aside, he did a fine job describing the problem of modern society, especially one based on blind consumerism that does nothing to further the development of man. While his anti-family and anti-tradition solutions can’t be applied but for a tiny percentage of naturally hermetic men, his cultural analysis makes this book worth reading, especially for men who need a wake-up call from living an empty modern lifestyle.
On superfluous work
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
[…]
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. (…) He has no time to be anything but a machine.
[…]
However, I should never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I should become a horseman or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied?
[…]
Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
[…]
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East—to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them—who were above such trifling.
On comfort
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
On status
It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where… people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.
On self-development
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man’s pursuits are no worthier than the savage’s, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
[…]
“But,” says one, “you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
[…]
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
On deliberate, simple living
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I 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, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
[…]
There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes.
[…]
An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
On poverty
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
On self-awareness
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
On current events
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.
On reading the classics
A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;—and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “Little Reading,” and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
He thinks the solution to a culture of anti-intellectualism is to encourage reading and open more schools, but we’ve done that in the 150 years since his book was written and the actual result has been a decrease of intellectualism. It’s not the availability of books or idea that is the problem, but the dumbing of minds into passive receptacles of mass-produced slop.
Thoreau genuinely believed that his complaints could be solved by a tweak here or there, but he did not understand that human beings seek the path of least resistance, and when they are presented with a classical book of some sort versus getting attention on Facebook by uploading pictures of themselves, they will always pick the latter. He thought he lived at the lowest point of America’s intellectualism, but actually lived at its height.
On solitude
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
On pleasure
I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.
The copy of Walden I had also included his famous essay Civil Disobedience, which purportedly inspired the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
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A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.
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But the rich man… is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.
[…]
For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
One of the reasons that Walden persists in popularity, beyond its message of “simple living” in an increasingly complex world, is that it serves as one of the best natural experiences ever recorded. It’s a breath of fresh of air to read an outdoors tale while modern society continues its blind descent into worshiping at the altar of cosmopolitanism and technology to solve all problems of human existence. At the same time, I don’t know how seriously I can take Thoreau about his prescription of living in the woods. He sang high praises for nature and solitude but ultimately decided, after two years, to permanently live away from nature and solitude. Maybe he was trolling?
Thoreau gets mixed reviews to this day, and I believe it’s not because of his message but his abrasive contempt and hypocrisy for not living a life that he suggested for others. Had he been a bit more humble and genuine, I have no doubt his work could have at least equaled that of his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is considered an American hero by many. In spite of that complaint, this book does have tremendous value, especially the first half, and should be read by men who have gotten sucked up by a consumer tidal wave, and who need to be reminded of the folly of that path.
Read More: “Walden” on Amazon
Hypocricy is the rich’s greatest luxury
The historical context of a text is very important to consider while reading. Thoreau was writing in an era where modernization and industrialization was picking up steam. People were moving from the communities of the countryside to the isolation of cities.
Spiritual struggles then, spiritual struggles now.
Now you are reminding me of the big hideous feminist who graduated high school a year before me who used that “I went to the woods” quote as her senior quote in the yearbook. If ‘woods’ had been replaced with ‘IHOP’ it would have made a lot more sense.
ROFL. Yep. Big, bold and errr, beautiful (just ask them) … there were several of them floating around campus when I was in college. ZZ Top’s “I wouldn’t touch her with a 10-foot pole” keeps coming to mind …
Just reminded me of a Jim Gaffigan bit… “‘IHOP’? More like ‘I can barely move’ or ‘I need a nap’.”
forget it. Thoreau is no great writer or philosopher for that matter, either. Read North’s deconstruction of the liberal lionization of Thoreau here: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/04/the-truth-about-henry-david-thoreau-and.html and here: http://www.garynorth.com/public/13068.cfm
That guy is taking it a little too seriously, Thoreau was more of a poet. The “liberals” have twisted a lot of stuff to their perverse agenda
Indeed that miserable screed is the cause of more “washed up vegans in the woods” crap than I think any other influence.
Yeah nothing like getting away from the city to get away from their degeneracy and votes and lo and behold, here come the people putting peace symbols in their front yards and before you know it, the schools are pushing diverrrrrrrsity, the property taxes are going up to pay for “progrrrrrrams”. and you can’t shoot on your own property because of lead ammmmo or noiiiiiise or saaaafety.
(I’m putting “NPR voice” in text).
Fuck Thoreau.
Give up on your 19th century already. I assume you think slaves should be brought back next…
I talk shit about Starbucks but still drink their coffee.
I think it sucks that they have a monopoly over the café business. When I have the choice I always go to local chains but near where I live the only coffeeshop with wifi is Starbucks.
Fuck Starbucks. I love you Starbucks.
We had a new coffee shop open up in our area. It’s a chain but they’re all local and it’s only like 4-5 stores total…local enough! Anyway, it has free wifi, nice atmosphere, and offers a free refill on coffee. Name is Lasater’s if anyone is interested in seeing if there’s one near you.
Rumor has it they pump the water that they use to make their “coffee” straight out of the local sewers.
I can’t wait to go to Starbucks on Mars.
Don’t know what’s more damaging: the perchlorate-saturated water on Mars or the estrogen-saturated water in Toronto.
Thank God I have Kratom
And electrolytes
hey guys ! Johnny ( the Conan avatar guy ) here. I’ve dunked down for a while after learning that the services are lurking around the net. Shit is going insane here in Old Dacian ground. The saying ,,barbarians at the gates” is truer than ever for us but the worse is that ,,barbarians are also in Parlament & Gov”. Here, we are just a few steps from collapse.
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The ultimate food pyramid!
You make your coffee with water? Like outta the toilet?
No, dummy. You make it with Brawndo.
It has electrolytes.
My uncle laughs at anyone who pays over a dollar for a cup of coffee. 70 cents at the local convenience store.
Too true. I try to support local, but, the Mc Donalds/Starbucks restaurants are always located in very handy areas, especially if you drive. It’s only after I bought unthinkingly a Mc Donald’s coffee the other day that I realized how easy it is not to practice what you preach on occasions.
Written at an age and time different from now. But yet similarities with the present time isn’t so far off the mark.
He thought he lived at the lowest point of America’s intellectualism, but actually lived at its height.
This stands out to me the most. He saw flaws in an imperfect system and longed for a way to improve it. This is what made western civilization great throughout history. This also makes me realize things can get much worse than they are today. Collapse appears imminent, but we haven’t seen Caligula-level appointing a horse to top government positions and fiddling while the state burns degeneracy yet.
Thoreau was troubled by the trends he saw near the height of American culture, where he perceived corruption and weakness. Today, we are faced with an utterly corrupt, immoral, lazy, weak society, and most can’t even be bothered to acknowledge this, much less be motivated to change it.
I found his quote on poverty telling. Unless one is truly starving, as long as one has food and shelter, poverty is not the worst thing in the world. In my travels, I have found people in small villages surrounded by their families to live happy, peaceful lives. Sure, they may have to cook over a wood burning stove that takes longer than mine powered by underground gas pipes, but they have none of the worries and stresses that modern society gives, and they are much more connected to others and grounded.
So true. Our church regularly goes on mission trips to truly poor countries like Honduras. I haven’t gone on such a trip yet, but have talked to those that come back. It’s puts things in perspective. They all say the same thing:
They walk in their door, look around, and are simply amazed how good they have it. Even the poorest people in the USA have it better than 90% of the world’s population. Not to say we shouldn’t try to bring them up further, but let’s keep things in perspective.
Yes…If I were a psychiatrist I would never treat depression with meds. My treatment would be a plane ticket and a week’s stay in a 3rd world country like Bangladesh or India. Depressed people just need some perspective ( and a kick in the ass) . Folks would come back , kiss the tarmac on arrival and be dancing a jig they’d be so happy…
That may help spoiled and selfish people but real depression is a mental illness so what you described is unlikely to help.
Reminds me of the English poet Philip Larkin’s poem Toads, about the aspirations we’ve all had at some point to give up our career and live freely off the land with the so-called simple folk. However our inner toads always poison us with the black ink of worldly pessimism, yet as he says in the poem despite the toads prompting “No one actually dies of starvation”……..there’s an option, until we get cold and lonely and realize that this is no life for a former librarian.
In an american context, I think Walter White in Breaking Bad had something of that very good law abiding, average american man, who says “fuck this” when diagnosed with cancer…he discovers his true potential, but only when he knows he’s going to die soon, and that’s tragic, but at least he died a less ordinary man in the end.
To Walter White…a great american anti- hero.
Live for nothing, or die for something. You can enjoy the decline as much as you like, but those who are hungry will seize power when the shadow elites fall. Be wary of those with ravenous appetites and stay clear of them, for they are more dangerous than any of the elites diseased schemes combined. They are necessary evil perhaps, in the coming storm. Ambitions… dreams… some people, is there anything more solid that one could possess?
Thanks for this.
He was a spoiled Sally, but he did have a point. I spent my 20’s running around cities, drinking in bars, chasing tail, buying fancy duds, and generally being a 20-something ugly American asshole. Then I moved up north and started playing outside more and more. Life changing. I’m sure age plays a role, but I’d rather be in carhartts in the woods hunting with my dog than in a suit in Vegas hunting vapid sluts.
Reading Walden this month. I just started yesterday; funny how this article pops up.
I’ll read the article when I finish the book.
Roosh, you might want to read the book, “Possum Living: How to live well without a job and (almost) no money.” It was written in the 70s by a young girl named Dolly, living with her father, a borderline alcoholic, who nevertheless was able to create a comfortable life for himself and his daughter doing what they wanted to do day by day and working only just enough to pay for the essentials. She said they needed just $1500 a year in the early 70s.
The girl did go on to college and became an engineer at NASA, remarkably! She also got married and had a brood of kids and lived a suburban life. But unlike Thoreau, she never once said, “This is the way to live your life. This is real. This is authentic.” No, she simply wrote about the simple life she and her father lived during her teen years up to her very early 20s. Her father took her out of school in 7th grade.
She has been astounded at the book’s continued underground success. Very real.
Living on a shoestring must have been like living in the contained environment of a space capsule with limited amounts of essentials. The ability to crunch numbers and think ahead with economy determining every moment of survival develops an acute numbers sense and a keen sense of statistics and probabilities. Extreme cold weather dwellings operate the same. The occupants of an ice covered yurt could likely beat a numbers game like poker played with any fat dumb and happy consumers who are surrounded by waste and an excess of disposable goods.
For a fascinating write up on those ideas, check out “Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, by Mihaly Check-zet-mihaly (no chance I could ever spell it and I’m not gonna look it up!). He talks a bit about isolated cultures developing exceptional memories, etc., and how they were able to experience a state of Flow that many people describe as true happiness. Very interesting stuff.
Not seriously at all. How about this cunt:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/31/its-now-or-never-texts-reveal-teens-efforts-to-pressure-boyfriend-into-suicide/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na
Why is she being charged as a JUVENILE? She’s 17!
And why did you post that here?
Under 18 is considered juvenile in most states. I linked here to show the community, as it’s another in a long line of tragic consequences that can be traced directly back to misguided feminism.
The point of my question was not one of law, but of custom. Prosecutors have the discretion to, and have no problem with, trying 14 year old boys as adults if the crime is heinous enough. This crime qualifies!
Yet because she’s a woman, a mere girl, she is treated as being LESS responsible than a boy of 17 who had done the same thing to his girlfriend. In fact, imagine if this that were the case and the roles were reversed. This would be international news, 24/7 and we’d be hearing about the absolute IMPERATIVE to STOP boys from bullying GIRLS! How evil the patriarchy is to girls and how boys are inherently evil, manipulative players who MUST be controlled. By drugs if possible.
Even the fact that this boy is an pitiable omega gets no play in the media. He is the MALE. He deserves no consideration.
Actually, I’m surprised they charged her at all!
The US justice system is a complete joke. Ever had the misfortune of being involved in it? I have. Most of the “prosecutors” are little girls. In bed figuratively or literally with the corrupt, tyrannical judges. This dump (the USA) is circling the bowl and to me can’t get flushed fast enough.
Read Howe and Strauss: “The Fourth Turning”. Henry David Thoreau was the equivalent of a Boomer in his secular cycle. Walden was his “Summer of Love” phase. Prophet generations always tend to narcissism.
Can a civilized man live in the woods permanently? I doubt it, they might be lovely, dark and deep, but I imagine there be few that return to her keep.
The morale of this tale is the same one all the 19th European Romantics eventually learned, we can only now return to nature as world weary refugees from the excesses of our industrial, technocratic based societies. Paradoxically, it was our very civilizing as a species that made us estranged from nature in the first place, and yet it’s this detached estrangement that’s allow us, like Thoreau, to appreciate and value nature as wonderful thing in-itself. When we were primitive we depended on nature for our daily survival, in this stage you don’t reflect on it as you’re too close too the coal face to see the wood from the trees.
I believe there is a inscrutable and intrinsic connection between man and nature, I’ve experienced it on occasions when out hiking- it’s arises when nature miraculously reciprocates your presence in the world. It has it’s own intelligence and ways..
”men would be judged differently if they were unclothed”
and: (rough stable boy/master translation) ”if you didn’t build that, then it’s not good for you”
Thoreau isn’t being cynical, he’s serious. His prose was from 150 years before another particular man but Thoreau very closely resembles George Carlin.
“Can you imagine a young man coming up to you and saying that his elders have absolutely nothing of use to say?”
To be fair, baby boomers are our elders and many here on ROK like to bash on them. Maybe Thoreau had a similar feeling for the immediately previous generation.
I lived off grid and in the woods for 15 years, and observed the same thing about Thoreau – what a pompous fraud. I wrote this some years back, but it tells the tale as well as I could now: http://gregrichter.com/blog/index.php?itemid=24