Thoreau and the Examined Life

by Karl Frank  Aug 18, 2019

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember, that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. These are from the opening words of Walden. I start with them because they apply to what I have to say today. This is not meant as an impersonal philosophy lecture on the subject of Thoreau, but a report of how and why Thoreau matters to me, how his work figured in my life. To create the illusion that I am speaking of a close friend, I may call him „HD“. His was an uncommonly intentional life, and one way of reading Walden is as the polished-up record of his examination of his own life, with advice as to how you and I might examine our own lives and (to use a favorite word of his) improve them. Of course, Walden is not just a record of HD’s examination of his life — nothing, least of all a good book, is ever just one thing. Except for being just itself, in all its particularity. Yes, Walden is a study of the seasons of the year in Concord Massachusetts, but it is also a critique of Yankee materialism, a collection of philosophical fragments poking holes in revealed religion, and also advice to other aspiring intellectuals of modest means on how they too might find the quiet time to pursue a career in writing. Most accurately, Walden is a polished and organized collection of the entries its author wrote in pencil most every day of his adult life, in his journals. How may our lives be improved? That is a question discussed in Walden through which Thoreau influenced my life, throughout a period of some 20 years, starting about 50 years ago. Walden starts out with a materialistic account of the author’s life, worthy of a Marxist. The first chapter is named Economy, and the first sentence is: When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone in the woods, in a house I had built myself, and earned my living by my hands only. This is the way he summarizes a two-year experiment in living. I hope you will see, soon enough, why a book that begins that way, about where to live and how to support oneself, in the context of an experiment in living, became important at that time 50 years ago. That period in my life centers on in the summer of 1973. Marjory Foster, Dean of Douglass College, wrote to inform me that my contract would not be renewed when it expired in 1974. A pink-slip letter has great power to focus one‘s mind on life and its prospects. Not just my life: I was married, with daughter Cynthia, 8, and son Max 5. My wife Joan and I had moved to New Jersey for exactly one reason: my job teaching philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. With Dean Foster’s letter, this reason disappeared. I mentioned how Thoreau began Walden. In the conclusion, he wrote: I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of one‘s / his
Thoreau and the Examined Life
dreams, and endeavors to live the life one / he has imagined, one / he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. And then, as his very last sentences, he wrote: Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. It appears from this conclusion that Thoreau’s experiment in living was a success. Sandwiched between the no-nonsense material opening, and the conclusion, incandesent with optimism, was a body of work that I had been studying closely, because in my work at Douglass, I had been team-teaching an interdisciplinary course that included Walden. A friend in the English department cooked it up with me, in an obvious attempt to attract more students to our classes: the course traced the history and writings from America‘s many utopian experiments, from the Puritans who came to Massachusetts to found a theocracy, meant to be a city on a hill, to certain hippy communes of the late 1960s, with lots of other attempts in between. Thoreau‘s individualism, furnished with 3 chairs, as he wrote: one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society- illustrated a non-collective utopia, and in that respect was out of step with the Woodstock Generation‘s ideas, but in most every other respect, Thoreau was the philosophical voice for that era. Here are the words to Joni Mitchell‘s 1969 song: Well, I came upon a child of God He was walking along the road And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going This he told me Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm Gonna join in a rock and roll band Got to get back to the land and set my soul free We are stardust, we are golden We are billion year old carbon And we got to get ourselves back to the garden Well, then can I roam beside you? I have come to lose the smog, And I feel myself a cog in somethin’ turning And maybe its the time of year Yes and maybe its the time of man And I don’t know who I am But life is for learning We are stardust, we are golden We are billion year old carbon And we got to get ourselves back to the garden By the time we got to Woodstock We were half a million strong
Thoreau and the Examined Life
And everywhere was a song and a celebration And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes Riding shotgun in the sky, Turning into butterflies Above our nation We are stardust, we are golden We are caught in the devils bargain And we got to get ourselves back to the garden Yes, the rock and roll and the gathering of the tribe of half a million are not to Thoreau‘s taste. Recall his three chairs. He would have despised the drugs and the sensuality (Whitman was the 19th century man who would have been at home in Woodstock – Thoreau was not sure he entirely approved of Whitman‘s poetry, though he recognized Whitman‘s importance.)
But all the rest of Joni Mithchell‘s lyrics, if we were to take the time, could be traced to Thoreau. The universalism, the potential divinity of every „child of God“, the escape from the cogs of a mechanized life, even the appreciation for the cosmic history of the evolution of our organic chemistry – billion year old carbon – would have made Henry David‘s heart sing had he learned of it. Upon his introduction to Darwin‘s work documenting the facts of evolution, Thoreau was an immediate supporter.
So towards the end of the Woodstock Era, after some years of living in suburban New Jersey, my wife and I considered what to do next.
Walden was not our only guide. Stuart Brand‘s Whole Earth Catalog, whose motto was Access to Tools, was a sourcebook for learning how to do the kinds of things that attracted us, and its epochal Last Issue with the photograph of our blue boat home seen from space was as motivational as Thoreau’s The sun is but a morning star.
I had taken the job at Douglass in 1966 at the birth of our first child. This effectively involved dropping out of NYU graduate school before finishing my degree. This was when Joan left her job in Manhatten.
Joan and I were not part of the Woodstock generation, neither were we baby boomers, and were definitely not hippies or connected with the drug culture. We were older allies of those cohorts: we marched against the Vietnam war. Joan was the first woman I knew who learned the Lamaze method of natural childbirth and nursed our children.
While I had been teaching, Joan had been buying mail order from the Walnut Acres catalog (perhaps the first commercial organic farm, started by a former missionary who had known Ghandhi in India). She began baking all our bread. From that she progressed to been organic gardening herself, which involved truckloads of aged manure dug into our backyard garden.
Among the books I assigned in my course on the history of utopian communal experiments, Joan took a particular liking to Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing. This was specially appropriate because the personal crisis that motivated the Nearings in their search for the good life was much like our own: Scott had been dismissed from his university teaching position. More than that, the Nearings found their good life in Vermont, which was where we had some friends from our years in New York.

Thoreau and the Examined Life
We decided that it made no sense to look for work in New Jersey. Our decision was to first live the kind of life we wanted, choose the place we wanted to live, then sell our suburban house and move. First things first. The jobs would be secondary, come later, not let our lives be determined by our employment, or our employment be determined by how much they promised to pay. Our friends and family were skeptical, some were afraid for us. I don‘t think I need to spell out how such an ordering of objectives fits with those of the man who wrote:
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. We calculated we could buy land, the materials for a house, and live for a couple of years, on the proceeds of our Levit-built house, after which we would know our way around our new surroundings, own our owner-built home (the title of another book we read) and find work. Like Thoreau, we were not survivalists, intent on doing everything ourselves, nor were we looking to live with others in a commune. It worked out well enough. We both found work we liked, and loved the experience of designing and building our house with our own hands, in a town where our friends were mostly engaged in doing exactly that, or who had already finished doing it successfully and were glad to help. When a hurricane came along in August of 1976 while we were still living in tents with our unfinished house nearby, one couple who had built a yurt first, and from that graduated to a large log hexagonal house, let us move into the yurt, and another couple, who had graduated to a house with indoor plumbing, showed up with their now-unneeded privy in the back of their truck to save us the trouble of building an outhouse. We were poor during many of those years, and it took longer than we expected to graduate from an outhouse to indoor plumbing, but we made it. After 15 years, our children both having graduated from high school, we moved on and landed in Gloucester. Thoreau wrote: I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.