I think it’s fitting to write a blog about Thoreau, since you could think of him as nothing less than the founder of American blogging (unless that title should go to Benjamin Franklin). Once you stop to think about it, so many American writers have been bloggers. Moby Dick, for example, with its two-page chapters and onion-skin accretion of meaning. And Mark Twain certainly would have been a good blogger. The blog as genre is very much linked to an Enlightenment ideal of self-improvement, “cultivate your garden” and so forth, which is often associated with early Americanism. The idea of a nation as an experiment, life as an experiment and the writer a note taker.
The idea of deliberate self-formation is central to Walden. I think a lot readers get caught up in the specifics of Thoreau’s attempt at self-determination and miss the more general question the book asks, which is: to what extent is self-determination possible? How far is it possible to live by choice? What are the limits of our ability to determine our own lives?
This gets back to another question I have raised before on this blog, why do we obey? How much of our obedience is truly forced? And how much of our willingness to obey is just that, an ingrained cognitive bias which works against our rational good as individuals. Put another way, the question Thoreau tried to answer was, do we submit to the laws of society because ultimately it pays off, or out of habit? And how can we know if we benefit from inclusion in society if we have never tried to live without it?
Obviously, the idea of using your own life as an experiment quickly comes up against limits. One cannot be both the subject of an experiment and its observer. Furthermore, what is true for you may not be for me, so how do I know the results of your experiment are valid for me?
I think for this reason people who tend to be detail-oriented or result-based thinkers really hate Thoreau. I myself very much fall into this category. For me a large part of the satisfaction of identifying plants and fungi, or reading history, lies in the concentration on details. Accumulating and understanding detail gives me a sense of control. This has been part of the challenge of my current job (helping students with disabilities transition into adult lives) in which success is more often a matter of the big picture, and may not produce any results at all in the short term.
Attention to detail is often an advantage, and is highly prized by our educational system. As a society though, I think we might overrate measurable results, and tend to confuse the signs of something for the goal itself. In some situations, my current job for example, it seems to be the big picture thinkers who are more clear-sighted and, paradoxically, down to earth. Whereas I might obsess over a detail and blow it out of proportion to its true worth, someone else might, by ignoring that detail accomplish the same task far more simply and directly.
I think the strength of Walden lies in its basics. Perhaps this explains its influence. The impact lies not in how it was done, but in the fact it was done at all.
recycled paper clips 