The news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated. Just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I haven't been reading. On the other hand, just because I've been reading doesn't mean I'm caught up. But school's out, and I don't think I'm going to take anything this summer so I should have a chance to get back in the game. There's this book, and then I have another book completed that I will write about the first chance I get. I'm also partway through two others. Still, I really need to be working on book 19 if I want to be on schedule, so I still have a ways to go.
As you might have guessed I had to read this one for school, but I had never read it before. At this point one might be asking, just what DID I read when I was younger? The answer is: not as much as I should have. Most of my early reading was in classic science fiction like Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, Bradbury, etc., etc., although I did find room for some other things. Also, when I bothered to put down the frisbee and go to class, I had to knock through some Shakespeare and Hemingway and such, but still there are gaps in my literary experience that are big enough to drive a truck through. Anyway, lets get to it.
Book 13 - Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Walden is Henry David Thoreau's experiment in applied Emersonian philosophy. A great admirer of Emerson's work, not to mention Emerson's wife, Thoreau sets out to demonstrate his self-reliance by squatting on someone else's land a few miles outside of town. Thoreau spends the entire first chapter (which takes up about a fifth of the book), explaining in detail his income and expenses from the project. However, he leaves out key details, which tend to skew things a bit. Did I mention that the land belonged to Emerson, and that Thoreau didn't have to buy it or pay rent? Or that he lived but a short walk from the heart of Concord, MA, and frequently went into town to dine at his mother's house or at the house of one of his friends?
These details aside, his message is powerful: "Simplify, simplify, simplify." If you don't have a lot of stuff, you don't need a fancy house to keep it in, and you don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning it. If you don't eat a lot of food, you don't have to buy or grow a lot of food. He also tells us that "To be awake is to be alive." and says that "Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Some look to Thoreau as an environmentalist, and with good reason. Thoreau definitely espouses the small footprint idea and many of the ideas of the locally grown food movement. His descriptions of nature are as powerful as an Ansel Adams photograph. He also seems to be very much against technology and progress, but it's not really because he wants to save the planet. He questions the usefulness of a telegraph from Maine to Texas, fearing that they might not have anything to say to each other. He also questions the efficiency of taking the train, claiming the time you would have to work and the wages you would have to expend, it would have been faster and cheaper to get there on foot (we are not talking cross-country here, his destination was only 30 miles away).
Thoreau's powers of observation are formidable. No detail of the landscape escapes his keen eye. He offers us detailed descriptions of Walden Pond and it's surrounding environs as it moves through the four seasons of the year: the forest all abuzz with life in the summer; the cool crispness of the fall; the blanket of quiet that falls over the pond in winter; and finally emerging in the rebirth of spring. Along the way he relates histories of the area and its people, and even takes a pause to describe in incredible detail the war between two colonies of ants. While this was surely an illustration of the brutality of combat in general, considering the time it was written it might have also been a warning of the horrors of the civil conflict that was looming on our nation's horizon.
Maybe I'm getting used to the nineteenth century writing style, but I found this book easy to read. My only problem with it was that Thoreau's descriptions of nature can be so vivid as to be hypnotic, and I frequently found myself lost in a reverie, not knowing when I had stopped reading and when my imagination had kicked in. It is a worthwhile read, and like many of the books I've read for this course, it definitely stirred up some ideas in my dusty old noggin. I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it, and to anyone who hasn't read it in a while.
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