A lesson for all Steemians

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The picture that Thoreau's novels paint of American life is not a flattering one, and much of what their characters have to complain about, Thoreau talks about, too: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It’s probably the most famous line in Walden and describes Bartleby and Ethan Frome and Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm and even Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas pretty well.

Unlike the novels, however, Walden tries to offer a solution to the problems they describe – a carefully planned and precisely costed working-out of Bartleby’s famous motto “I prefer not to”. Walden is a book about what your life would look like, how you would fill your days, how your relation to the world would change, if you didn’t have to spend money on real estate. “The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel…”

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Bare necessities

For food, he recommends a vegetable diet and tells you how to grow what you need. Fuel is easily gathered and, if you don’t follow fashions, it shouldn’t be hard to acquire and maintain a decent set of working clothes. But shelter is really what we spend our money on – in other words, it’s what we spend our lives on. And as soon as you get the need of a house off your back (“such a house as your neighbours have”), the world looks like a very different place:

"Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the labourers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free."

Part of the power of this passage comes from the fact that we can’t help associating that toolbox with a coffin – and the life he seems to recommend, with something like death. In the two years that Thoreau spent living in the woods, America was going through a golden age of experiments in communal living, some of them run and organised by people he knew. (Brook Farm, probably the most famous, burned down and eventually failed while he was at the lake.)

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An alternative of alternatives

Walden was pitched as an alternative to these alternatives. It was designed to leave a lot of life out, not only kids and family but everything that comes with them – competitive dinner parties, the struggle for promotion. Because when we buy or rent a house, when we work the job it takes to afford it, we’re striving not just for shelter but a whole range of ordinary ambitions.

What would we spend our love and freedom on if not on those things? Answering this is the real challenge Thoreau sets himself – and it’s more difficult than explaining how to build a hut. The opening of Walden includes one of the great first pages in American literature, but the book that follows is often harder to like. It never quite lives up to the standard he sets himself:

"Moreover, I on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me."

@mindhunter

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