Walden; Or, Life in the Woods
- Jun 21, 2010
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
★★★☆☆
Four years ago, I had occasion to travel to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to give a presentation to the design program at Northeastern State University. It was there, while being shown through Tahlequah's meager downtown by my brother and his wife (both undergrads at NSU), I made my way into a used bookshop having had a strong—and unexplained—urge to pick up a copy of Thoreau's Walden. When I returned home, the book found its way to a high shelf in the living room and languished there for a number of reasons, not least of which because I was up to my eyeballs with a subscription to The New Yorker. By the following year, I'd given up the New Yorker and was thoroughly back on books, yet Walden was passed over time and again, though largely, by now, for a singular reason: I was afraid it would ruin me.
You see, I've been a vegan and environmentalist going on twenty years now; my wife and I have a large urban garden; we're working with an architect to transform our house into a model of sustainability and self-sufficiency; and I've already found myself struggling with the ways of our modern world after, in the past couple of years, reading the likes of Ishmael; The Story of B; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; and The World Without Us. Walden, I feared, would be the final nail in the coffin that would drive me to sell my house, build a small cabin off the grid in the middle of nowhere, and learn to live by my hands and my wits. Of course, that may yet happen, but I'd very much like my wife to be along for the ride, and she's not quite keeping up with my reading list.
So, with Walden now read, did it do as I'd feared? Yes and no. The opening chapter, "Economy," certainly set me up to believe as much, and was so moving I read it twice, frequently conveying lengthy passages aloud to my wife. But on the whole, the book was bogged down by too much tedium and minutiae and by Thoreau's own conflicted opinions. Still, the overarching messages of self-reliance, of living deliberately and simply, and of non-conformity remain higher aims worth striving for. And while in my own life I may be more successful at some than others, my sights will always be set upon them.
Comments