The week included a great deal of nature, time and space, and mostly a complete lack of wifi and cellphone access. Thoreau shares his reflections and insights from 18 months living simply in the woods in a home he build himself. He comments on materialism, capitalism, work, and the meaning of life. 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.
Overall, I found the book dense, overly wordy, and dated , but also brilliant, profound, and relevant to modern life. Here are some of my takeaways. Thoreau laments that there are those who study philosophy and the work of philosophers, but fewer who actually write or practice philosophy.
Today it seems that there are so many who would critique and evaluate the work of others from a safe intellectual distance, rather than engage in the messiness of creation and subject themselves to critique. See also Paulo Freire on Praxis and Maria Popova on critical thinking, hope, and cynicism in the creative process. Jul 18, AM. Mar 06, AM. Ray books view quotes. Feb 27, PM. Feb 25, AM. Rita 1 book view quotes. Nov 23, PM.
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Thoreau wrote :. I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
The passage might offend us, in its dismissiveness of actual slavery. How could Thoreau say that a northern overseer was worse than a southern one? Or that any form of self-rebuke was worse than actual oppression? It should shock us. Many in his audiences would have been largely sympathetic to abolitionism, and therefore usually opposed to even comparing the factory system to slavery, never mind describing it as worse.
Thoreau was not so sanguine about industrialism. He wanted to hold together the critique of slavery with the critique of wage labour and to fight for a politics that would seek a radically different economy for both the South and the North.
In this way, we can see that the practices of renunciation that Walden recommends are oriented by and a response to ongoing political contestation. I interpret Walden as theologically invested in a contest over the practical, economic significance of the Christian tradition. The key passage for this argument is at the end of the first chapter of Walden , where Thoreau presents an emphatic tirade against philanthropy.
Many of his readers have taken this as an indication that he was disinclined to care about other people. Thoreau himself begins these paragraphs with the recitation of a charge he had apparently heard against his experiment in Walden Woods, and what appears to be a confession to the charge :. But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises.
But the confession does not match the accusation. It does not turn out looking very good. This has a deeper, troubling significance with respect to what philanthropists are doing when they provide for the needs they think the poor have.
If it is the case that the philanthropist just wants everyone to have the goods that he, the philanthropist, values, then philanthropy is the enforcement of a set of values that may not be and likely are not shared.
The philanthropist may never find out. This seems a paltry pastime. Furthermore, if philanthropy acts to enforce the fashions cherished by the philanthropist, then it neglects the evil that people actually suffer. It does not even aim at true problems.
The enslaver Thoreau describes practices a form of historical Christianity when he takes the proceeds of the tenth child he sells to allow the remainder of those enslaved to practice the Christian sabbath. Despite his objection to the Christianity of the pious slave breeder, Thoreau maintains deep engagement with the teachings of Jesus. In his critique of philanthropy — throughout Walden — Thoreau alluded often to the Bible, especially to the Sermon on the Mount.
In his contest with the philanthropist over what constitutes Christian goodness, Thoreau also recalled a famous story from the Gospel of Luke. The first thing Jesus did was take exception to being called good. The man responds that he has followed the commandments. Doing so would keep the philanthropist out of a position of power over the receiver, and it would prevent the recipient from being at the mercy of the philanthropist.
Without giving it all, philanthropists short-changed society. This line raised complicated associated issues about property and ownership. Thoreau called again for justice over charity.
The first is that I am generous. This was the one the philanthropists adopted. The second interpretation, which Thoreau wanted to raise, is that because the officers of justice have been remiss, they have left nine tenths of my income with me.
True justice would entail restoring it all to society. In all this, Thoreau offered an alternative understanding of the economic, practical significance of the Christian gospel, and in this shows that his message in Walden was — at least in part — a theological one.
Thoreau took up this call and lived into it. Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command: and I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.
Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Thoreau should have been more ambitious. He could have changed the world. Thoreau thought the finest society he could imagine was a huckleberry party. A huckleberry party is a community of equals sharing in a common aim, the enjoyment together of the fruits of the earth.
In Walden , Thoreau tried to show why knowing beans was itself resistance to the forces driving domination and exploitation. I read Thoreau as taking the community he found in Walden Woods as his moral example, and as inspiration for a form of economy that no one had yet imagined — an economy that would submit neither to the domination of slavery nor to the exploitation of industrial capitalism. This reading of Thoreau can shift what Thoreau is an example of for those who admire him in the environmental movement.
Not all will agree that he should serve as a moral exemplar, but for those who do, I think we ought to admire something rather different in him than we might have thought. Yes, he embraced individualism — marching to the beat of a different drummer — and yes, his independent living is inspiring to those of us hoping to live lighter on the earth.
But the thing I admire about him is that he saw the deep connections between justice among humans and justice for all beings. He had a nondominative doctrine of nature, and what it yielded in his life was a radical politics for labour justice that contributed to the enfranchisement of many oppressed people throughout the twentieth century. That is something to admire. This reading of Thoreau is not a panacea for contemporary ecological trouble at any scale, and certainly not at the scale we are currently facing.
Nothing is.
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