Date: 26 Nov 2017
Location: Bob & Linda
It was a small gathering of Bookers on this Sunday after Thanksgiving as we met to discuss Thoreau’s classic work.
Only a few of us actually made it through the entire book, and most of us who tried found the book boring and frankly rather tiresome. Only a single Booker claimed to have read the whole book and actually liked it.
This was an especially disconcerting read for me, who recommended the book. I recalled reading Walden back in high school and remembered really enjoying it. Not so this time! Thoreau came across to me as an arrogant and condescending jerk. While Thoreau extolled the attractions of nature and relished his independence and seclusion, I expect his neighbors in town would have been happier if he had built his cabin much further away.
Thoreau’s breadth and depth of knowledge certainly comes through in the work, and he gave us some memorable lines, such as “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. Nevertheless, plowing through the entire book was a pain and having to put up with Thoreau’s pomposity became very wearing.
Several of us mentioned having favorable memories of reading Walden in our youths. The concensus is that what we remembered were probably some short sections or extracts published in a literature book. Perhaps we had never tackled the entire book before.
— Bob
John, our resident English professor, was unable to attend our meeting and participate in the discussion, but he did re-read the book and agreed to share his thoughts with us.
Comments on Walden:
Cranky, preachy, self-righteous, fault-finding—Thoreau is all of these. Sometimes he thinks his interests should be fascinating to everyone, when they are really just the price of beans or the ice on the pond. But—
He is a serious thinker. Look again at the passage beginning “I went to the wood 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” and so on. This is the high calling of our days, a calling that all could well heed, though not necessarily by adopting, as Thoreau did, the hermit’s life. There must be other ways to answer this call, but he is right in seeing the need to escape haste, anxiety, and distraction. He hits pretty hard on the theme of “Simplify!” and perhaps drives it to extreme, but then how much wisdom do we gain when in traffic or when checking our smart phones?
Again: “Time is the stream I go a-fishing in.” Wow! What can we make of that? Well, it says that everything is in flux, nothing is permanent in this temporal world. But we can look through to the stream bed, as Thoreau does in the next sentence, to study the underlying eternity that abides.
So look closely: “What is a course of history or philosophy . . . compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer [see-er]? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” Or in modern terms “BE—HERE—NOW.” Thoreau pursues this idea with self-congratulation, though his point is to offer his experience as an example for us: “The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning and evening. It is a little star-dust caught [shades of Carl Sagan!], a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
And from time to time he has a flash of brilliance: “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.”
Ditto with a jab at pretentious shallowness: “I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gew-gaws on the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to solid and honest, though earthy foundation.”
So all in all my estimate is that Thoreau is difficult in a number of ways, but nevertheless Walden is worthy of thoughtful attention (at least the thoughtful attention of English majors). But what else would you choose to read for this kind of challenge to live fully? The Bible? OK. But have you read Isaiah lately? The moments of exaltation are planted amidst tracts of—well, whatever. And there is the conquest of Canaan with merciless slaughter done at the command of the Lord. So we pick and choose—most of us anyway. By comparison, Walden has its strengths and stands up pretty well.
— John