Summary

1. location

2. living deliberately

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendenta ... ter02.html
Walden Study Text

All right... I will try to get the ball rolling here. I think we all probably see the point of Thoreau here...not letting the unnecessary and extraneous nonessentials in our life "fritter away" and detract from the life which is meant to be led...the life we would follow if we listened to our intuition and found our own "genius".

This section always speaks to me because of how much more "detail" abounds today to fritter our life away. Thoreau's advice came before computers, cell phones, pagers (do people still use these?), email, blackberries (the hand held devices...not the fruit ), etc. Think about the advance that were each supposed to simplify life and make it easier... did we simplify? There are even magazines now geared toward making life more simple (for example Real Simple); however, does a vehicle like that actually provide more extraneous stimuli that detracts from our inner voice?


What do you think?

Thank you, Babybues, for getting the ball rolling. Even the inner voice is an occasion for complexity. I have a stack of books on intuition, and none of them has done me as much good as has Walden. I agree that we tend to fall into conventional paths to the neglect of our own genius.

Tom

Imagine what Thoreau would think of self-help books, which tell one the right way to "fix" oneself and makeover shows on TV, where they take individuals who are marching to their own drums and bring them closer to "normal," "pretty," "good-looking," "in-style" and "appropriate" as defined by society......

Yeah, the message you identify might be the central one that he had to tell us, the one he thought we might be best able to understand. Not many people are able to step off the merry-go-round, even fewer willing, probably. Why do many people feel they have ADD? Because they have to deal with so many distractions and divide their attention 50 ways. I think you're right about what his attitude would be toward all our advanced ways of distacting ourselves and communicating with each other. He would say, what's the sense if we have nothing important to say to each other. The man didn't even like the newspapers. I also like to think how he would react to present-day Concord, Mass.

I think his experiment in living at Walden Pond had the effect of resetting his baseline, in terms of what is necessary for human happiness and health, and what is luxury or distraction. He didn't live that way forever, obviously, but always kept with him the sense of what is really needed. We can follow him in this to an extent, at least. I make it no secret that I think we should.
DW

I suspect we have to ADD because we have Attention Deficit Disorder. Sorry, couldn't help myself!
Jeanette

This chapter seems to contain a lot of Thoreau's core beliefs, a number of aphorisms, and much brilliant writing. The only thing I can think to do with it is quote some passages, comment on them, and hope that might generate more discussion. I'm sorry for the great length of this. It's my homework assignment to myself. (The numbers refer to paragraphs. I think the paragraphs may have the same numbering regardless of the edition you are using.)

"...for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." (1)

This man is bad for the economy.

"But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail." (5)

This comes after he tells us about his speculating on certain farms, presumably with a view toward buying one. He gets a kind of vicarious ownership experience from all of that, and ends up being grateful to have thought better of it. Once again, he gives us his candid opinion of the farming life!

"Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe." (13)

Some readers point out that HDT didn't live in a remote area at all, and didn't isolate himself from society while living in the cabin, as if to say he was a bit of a fake. But this misses the point entirely, as he tells us here. We don't need to seek "rare and delectable places in some remote" area, but can often find them where we are. HDT was giving us a more practical plan for living than many realize. We could have the advantages of civilization while also being mainly citizens of nature.

"The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air -- to a higher life than we fell asleep from;" (14)

A concise explanation of why he never took a regular job. I think he's right about the morning. And it is a shame that we spend it struggling to get to work five days a week, and then might be too tired to enjoy the morning on the weekends.

"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. How could I have looked him in the face?" (14)

As Tom has already said, he wanted to wake us up. I find it very interesting that Tom says he had narcolepsy.

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour." (15)

This is an extremely high (impossibly high?) standard. I think it does show that HDT admired those who had asserted their individuality and changed the world in doing so. He likes heroes. This explains his admiration of John Brown.

"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. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever." (16)

It seems to me that throughout the book, he is careful to head off the notion that he is practicing resignation or renunciation. He retreats to get more out of life than is possible in the mainstream. I think he would have no admiration for a hermit who has no positive reason for living as he does, but just wants to avoid people and has a contracted experience.

"Our life is frittered away by detail.... Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion;... and the only cure for it... is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose." (17)

He's fond of the Spartan ideal (the military aspect of him that Emerson mentions in the eulogy?), mentions it several times in the book. To him, living within a strict economy frees up the spirit by lessening the demands of and obligations to the body.

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea..... As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time in the right proportions -- they may have changed the names a little since I saw the papers...it will be true to the letter." (19)

But it's good to keep up with what's going on in the world

DWill Wrote:


Looking through my own copy of Walden I noticed I had marked the few sentences just above, "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."

The sentences I have marked:
"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always..."


The two ideas, time and the wisdom of the infant/child are linked in this paragraph. Thoreau must intend for us to link them. He tells us clearly his attitude toward time; he takes it as he pleases with the full awareness of its limits (his own mortality). He leaves it for the reader to figure out what exactly is the wisdom of the newborn. So, what wisdom are we born with? An infant has total awareness of her own body and in coming sensual stimulation, a lack of cultural/societal filters that shape and distort in coming information (no cultural luggage, if you will) and no sense of time. Everything is now; there is no before and no later.

I think this second to the last paragraph in chapter two is his prescription for how to live; like a newborn, to be completely engaged in the present moment, with awareness (as in awareness of the information coming in through the senses and I would go further to say the workings of the mind - meta cognition) and a fully receptive (open) mind without the encumbrance of societal judgments (all language is culturally loaded).

Austin Meredith has a pdf file

THE JONESES AND THOREAU'S NARCOLEPSY
http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/concepts/narcolepsy.pdf

During Thoreau's time on Staten Island, Harding says: "He developed a chronic sleepiness, like that which haunted his Uncle Charles, and complained that he found it impossible to read or write, except at rare intervals" (The Days, p.152). It is ironic that Thoreau remains were moved to Sleepy Hollow.

http://www.thoreausociety.org/_news_visitconcord.htm

Tom

A meditation on the last paragraph of Chapter 2:

The Cloud of Unknowing and the Man Clock



This magical paragraph on the phenomenology of contemplative thinking
iconically embodies its own subject matter. That is, to follow what
it says about contemplative thinking, the reader must think
contemplatively about it. The seeming disconnectedness of the
sentences and the paucity of notes in Cramer are an advisory to
prepare for heavy semantic bogging.

"Time [the flow of current events] is but the stream I go a-fishing
in. I drink at it [face down: Narcissus fashion]; but while I drink
I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow [a life dedicated to
the passing moment] it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity
remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is
pebbly with stars."

The poet-philosopher proposes to fish for the heavenly fish, the
Great Man, humanity mirrored in the cosmos, the Ichthys with which
modern Christians (maybe not Unitarians?) decorate their cars. He
drinks of the social issues of the day, but sees through their
shallowness and wishes to shift from the excitement of the little
world of human affairs to a cosmic perspective where true being (the
drink and food of the true Eucharist) may be found.

"I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I
have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was
born."

Or as otherwise said: "...Except ye be converted, and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven"
(Matt. 18:3). Thoreau is proposing a return to original, integral
experience -- experience without division (therefore uncountable) and
without presupposition (named concepts). When informed experience
returns to unknowingness, creative reconstruction overcomes the dead
hand of convention. Human intentionality becomes inseparable from the
object of perception as the creator puts the stuff of life into the
creation. Art is autobiography.

"The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the
secret of things." A cleaver cuts its way into a corpse. Limiting
experience to the countable and conceptualizable, intellect
depersonalizes, alienates the knower from the known, and produces a
dehumanized social existence.

"I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary."
Busyness dissipates both the vitality of the person (next sentence:
the clock runs down) and the vitality of environing Nature through
consumption and destruction.

"My head is hands and feet" is a riddle whose answer is "a clock."
This clock is a spring-driven clock with hands on its face and little
feet under the face. Since the machinery is behind the clock's face,
the clock is almost entirely "head."

The mechanical clock is a symbol of human rationality run wild. It
cleavers time of season and life cycle, those features of existence
that are the basis of intentionality. In contrast, the man clock runs
on true, humane time -- the beat of his own drummer.

"I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it." Phrenologically,
of course. Elsewhere in his body Thoreau's health had begun to fail,
but a good person is a good mind, whatever the bodily state. A touch
of mortality wonderfully sharpens the mind -- or to continue the
metaphor, winds the clock.

"My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some
creatures use their snout [Thoreau had a prominent nose] and fore-
paws, and with it I would mine [pun for 'mind'] and burrow my way
through these hills."

"Instinct" -- the unconscious component of the self that provides
wise guidance for the conscious. His instinct tells him that he
should use the higher part of himself to penetrate to ultimate
reality now rather than putting the task off until some supposed
afterlife.

"I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts;"

"Vein" -- metallic ore, but also one's vein is one's personal
speciality. He has a special nose for such researches. "Somewhere
hereabouts" -- humorously for "within himself" and also for "in
ordinariness," as opposed to such exotic places as California or the
South Seas.

"...so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge;" -- I
judge by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors that the richest
vein is somewhere hereabouts.

"Divining-rod": in parallel with fishing-rod, and also literally an
instrument for finding the Divine Will. Thoreau's divining-rod is, I
believe, his special use of the Swedenborgian Doctrine of
Correspondences.

"Thin rising vapors": A complex allusion: 1. the vapors that generate
visions in Chanticleer (with whom Thoreau identifies) in The Nun's
Priest's Tale; 2. the late Medieval view that vapors in the earth
alembic produce veins of metal. Such vapors rising from the earth
would be a sign of where to mine. Agricola's De Re Metalica may be
the source. The "thin rising vapors" within Thoreau are, I believe,
the subtle affects from the perception of correspondence.

"And here I will begin to mine [mind]." The locus of "here" is the
fusion of habitat and human.

Thoreau wrote this paragraph with a smile on his face. It is a parody
of the Gold Rush fever. The stream whose bottom is pebbly with stars
alludes to the gold nuggets in the streams of California as does its
gold-dust carrying sandy bottom. Divining-rod and thin rising vapors
are archaic methods of prospecting he proposes for current use. He
proposes to set up mining locally without the bother of a difficult
trip to California. It is ironic that the Thoreau Mining Company
produced a cultural product of greater value than all the gold of
California.

Thomas Hood: While I think your explanation of this paragraph is interesting (and all the parallel ideas you reference), I can't help but disagree with you in some places and be a bit confused in others.



True, Thoreau was someone who wanted to get away from the social issues of the day, but I think the last thing he would do is reject a life dedicated to the passing moment. Time slides away from us--all time, that's what it is to live a mortal human life. But you can contemplate and get in touch with a transcendent eternity. I also think making the heavenly fish into the Ichthys is a bit of a stretch. I think Thoreau is speaking of a less specific desire to press deeper into the mysteries of the universe, not necessarily a Christian one.



Cool parallel and I do agree with your interpretation of this bit that followed.



I think that's a sad way of looking at intellect, and since Thoreau is just about to talk about using his head to burrow into the heart of things, I don't think he would start by belittling intellect.

I don't quote follow your discussion of the "Man Clock," either, nor the mine/mind pun (I feel that that's a stretch). Your discussion of the divining rod and the Gold Rush loses me entirely--I just do not see how they connect to Thoreau.

What I see in this paragraph is a realization of man's mortal, temporal existence and the possibility of reaching out into the limitless stars of eternity by way of the inquiring mind.

Thank you for paying attention to my notions, Indigo.



Well, yes, it's a stretch, but stretching helps keep us awake. Thoreau is thinking at too high a level to be referring to Pisces or Fomalhaut. In Swedenborg's writing, which Thoreau admired, the spiritual background of the world is Maximus Homo, the Grand Man, the Transcendental Logos. That is, the world is essentially human and has intrinsic moral quality. That is something worth fishing for. This idea is expressed concretely in astrology where the head is in Aries and the cosmic body encircles us in space around to the feet in Pisces. Cosmic comfort.



No, it isn't sad, it's realistic. Studies are divided into sciences and humanities, in that sciences concern means while humanities concern ends. Science never concludes a "Thou shalt." How to live a good life as a human being isn't covered in science textbooks. Thoreau insisted that a full human being must consider ends.


Thoreau on the Gold Rush:







Suppose you were playing games (Thoreau is playful) and someone ask a riddle: "My head is hands and feet. What am I?" What I am proposing is that Thoreau did ask such a riddle, and the focused reader after a few hours (what it took me), will think: Thoreau is thinking about man-in-time, so this could be a timepiece, and so the solution is a mantelpiece clock whose head (clock face) is the short and long hands, and whose feet are the little knobs on which it stands.

Tom

[quote="Saffron]The two ideas, time and the wisdom of the infant/child are linked in this paragraph. Thoreau must intend for us to link them. [/quote]

I think your linking is very plausible. Over in Chapter 4, "Sounds," he says more about "losing time" as he lets his senses sift through the world outside his door, hours later realizing that time has passed. I think I remember reading that as he grew older, and more interested (even obsessed) with pointed observations and measurements of nature, he regretted that his former faculties had eroded.

DWill

"To be awake is to be alive."

YES!

I at first thought that this was critical of the intellect, too--sort of like Wordsworth's "We murder to dissect"--but I agree with Indigo that clearly Thoreau thinks the cleaving is a desireable achievement of the intellect. Thoreau is not using "intellect" here in the limited sense that we often do, but more like "mind."

DWill