Walden

[I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers]

Here is my comment. Oh I forgot a period. Edit again. And again. And … again.

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[The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation]

Attempting another link. Can an admin edit? Test.

I have heard that this is not necessarily true. I linked below a NYT article outlining the possibility that Thoreau may have lived with other people on Walden Pond. I feel I even recall a professor claiming that he may have had people working for him there, though this memory is fuzzy, and I may be mistaken. If these things were true, they would seem to discredit a lot of Thoreau’s ethos.

Opinion | At Walden, Thoreau Wasn’t Really Alone With Nature – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Thoreau critiques the burden of inherited possessions like farms and land that tie individuals to a predetermined way of life and questions the value of such material wealth which suggests that those born into these circumstances and possessions may be at a disadvantage in understanding their calling or purpose. He metaphorically contrasts their situation with being raised in the open pasture and nurtured by a wolf, implying a closer connection to nature and a clearer perspective on life.

This entire introductory sentence is a run-on of him explaining where he lives, which is alone, independently, and peaceful.

[We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience]

I think this a really interesting idea that Thoreau is pointing out here – a lot of authors, I think, try to separate themselves in their prose from whatever is it they’re writing about, but Thoreau is openly admitting that this is a narrative coming from him, and because of that, it is necessarily limited.

This paragraph feels like it’s reaching out to the readers and relating in a very personal way. Whether people find this negative or positive, you cannot deny the writing is purposefully trying to reach a wide variety of readers. for example, “trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt”. This quote many Americans can relate to since it relates to the heart of the middle class. Getting a job and not being in debt is the driving force for many people. Many quotes such as this one in the paragraph can easily be relatable to the readers and pull them into the reading even more.

Thoreau suggests that the sun has a broader purpose than his simple understanding of it. The way he explains that he is conscious of how the sun acts as a larger concept than his definition or stories of the sun is crucial for understanding who he is as an author and as an individual. Thoreau also describes how beneficial it would be to see the world through someone else’s eyes. As he describes it, it would be a “greater miracle” for society.

Thoreau explains that it is terrible to be enslaved by someone else, but can be even worse to be enslaved by yourself. He uses the phrase, “public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion”. I think this is a fascinating perspective to have, implying that if your own mindset is harmful, you will never be able to be free, no matter you outside surroundings. I think this is an interesting way to put it.

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[and suckled by a wolf]

Romulus, the founder of Rome, and his brother Remus are fabled to have been stranded as babies at the foot of the Palatine hill and adopted and suckled by a she-wolf.

[I wrote the following pages]

Morse (150), choosing these opening lines as a notable example, says, “In truth W is a self-dramatizing, self-advertising and deeply duplicitous book that seeks to mask its excessive ambitions behind a facade of commonsense and practicality.” W is filled with wordplay of all sorts. Lane (1970) analyzes at length the puns in the first three paragraphs of the book. Donald Ross (1971) provides a checklist of the wordplay T uses.

[Economy]

Saunders suggests that T’s surprising use of economic terms to convey the joys of a natural and spiritual life is intended to demonstrate how overwhelmingly our vision of life is dominated by commercial values. For further discussion of T’s use of the word “economy,” see Werge and see Heinzelman. Blasing’s “The Economics of W” is a thoughtful and much broader study than its title implies. It includes a good discussion of W as autobiography. Neufeldt (1966, 156) points out that T in his earliest version of the W manuscript used one series of page numberings for “Economy” and a second for the rest of the book, as though “Economy” were an extended preface to W. The most extensive analysis of T’s economic theories is Neufeldt (1989). Birch and Metting give an interesting contrast of T’s economic theory with that of his contemporaries, saying, “T wanted to make it clear that the real quarrel between himself and his neighbors did not involve the necessity of work and industry but centered on the Calvinist doctrine that earthly duties, such as work, were necessarily a hardship to be endured and that accumulation of material wealth was a symbol of spiritual success.”

[debt, a very ancient slough]

T is undoubtedly referring to the “Slough of Despond” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress where insolvent debtors were mired.

Here Thoreau is speaking of how some humans are born into their future, specifically farmers. He thing this is unfortunate because people will struggle to get rid of being in this. It is human nature to do what the individual wishes to do and benefit themselves but if they are born into something they do not enjoy it may not be a fulfilled life. Compared to lock which says from labor we obtain property and he may look at this as a open door to perform labor and gain property if already born into it.

I think that quotations allow us to inspect a text from a different angle, which may, I admit, lead to a quotation being used in a way that is different from that the author had intended. Somewhat like looking at a detail of a painting. It can be something missed or overlooked. Thoreau himself was a quoter, not always attributing it, and not always quoiting correctly when it suited him to do otherwise (look at how he quoted Etzler’s text in “Paradise (to be) Regained.”) And I do think a single quotation can lead a person to the text, somewhat like how a single potato chip can lead you to the whole bag.

Had it not been for the wonders of Technology I would not have been able to study Thoreau from Iran. Technology made it possible to connect to Thoreau scholars in the US and and use their knowledge and wisdom to penetrate deep into Thoreau’s Walden and even deliver a translation of this book to my people.

[But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.]

The “better part” of the man is himself. In the previous paragraph, Thoreau emphasized the mistake in men cultivating and prioritizing land instead of the body and mind. The labor of cultivating and upkeep on land is a never ending task and gives little room for a person to cultivate themselves as an individual.

[It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

Men waste their lives focusing on the wrong things and do not realize it has been wasted until its over.

Thoreau’s use of the word “sojourner” proves that he has no intention of remaining in civilized life. From the very beginning of this book, he is trying to convince the reader that living in a house at Walden should be the ideal lifestyle for everyone. This is the beginning of Thoreau explaining what he believes is “living deliberately”.

[As if you could kill time without injuring eternity]

I recently saw this quotation on the Henry David Thoreau twitter handle as a stand-alone tweet, without the context of the entire book, or even the immediate context of the passage. It’s interesting to consider how quotations can  accurately sum up a theme of a whole section of a book, and can stand alone (as this one seems to be able to do nicely enough)– however, do things like focusing on “nice quotations” lead us to be lazy and not read the whole book, and thus lose the essential(?) support for the quotation? Will things like this easy quoting, tweeting, etc., only, go against the very meaning of this line itself if we don’t bother to read the book itself and merely rely on the “spark notes edition” of things? “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous.” I think T himself would be somewhat disappointed in how his name was being used, for quotable twitter handles, unless these “scaffolding” type tools like spark notes and easy-to-remember quotations led us to read the actual work.

[two years and two months]

Exactly two years, two months, and two days—that is, from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847.

[in Concord]

Concord, then a village of about 2,000 people, is 18 miles northwest of Boston. It is now a prosperous suburb with a population of 15,000.

[the shore of Walden Pond]

Lyon discusses Walden Pond as a symbol. “Walden remains Thoreau’s ultimate image of God upon Earth and the central symbol of the work to which it gives its name” (299).

When Thoreau talks about old people, he says they have no valuable information to pass on to the younger generation: “They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me…” As much as I agree with his view, I also disagree. When we are born, old people give us as much knowledge as possible so by the time we go to school and are educated, we know more than they do, because we have learned everything they taught us, and then some. However, old people have gone through most of life at this point and, let’s say he is talking about retired people, they either regret their course because they have worked their whole life and never appreciated anything, or they are happy with what they’ve done and have a big family or something. however, people have different values, and just because someone is old and happy with their lives, does not mean that somebody younger will find happiness from doing the same thing. listening to what older people have to say is somewhat like studying the humanities; it is a story of how another person lived. However, young people have their whole lives ahead of them and have yet to choose their path. So when Thoreau says, “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors”, he means that he will find out what brings him happiness on his own, and their stories may go against what he believes in.

I wonder how Thoreau felt about age “not profiting so much as it has lost” toward the end of his own life. Did he uphold the distinction created in “old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new”? Understanding and keeping up with recent technological advances requires various fresh approaches to “old deeds” like encoding language, so I tend to believe the relationship between old and new has become more fluid than ever before. Some old people learn new ways to interact with our technological world, some ‘new’ or young people revisit the old ways to learn history, or the origin of the new. Thoreau didn’t seem to hold out much hope for the prevailing wisdom of older generations. But he does indicate some connection with “and they are only less young than they were”; perhaps ‘youth’ or more broadly, ‘newness’, is a state of mind or a way of being that is momentarily achievable regardless of true age. Approaching technology especially with a transcendental, unprejudiced, and open mind seems key; anticipating learning the new even though you may have already mastered the old, framing life as a journey of continual learning rather than the journey as a means to an end like eventual wisdom. I think what Thoreau is getting at is that assuming mastery of life comes with age is flawed. The person who has the greater insight on the ‘true nature’ of life looks from the perspective of perpetual youth.

I think there is a very subtle irony in this part of the sentence. T could have said, “you … who live in…” Instead he twists the sentence and says, “you … who are said to live.” Implying that he himself does not recognize some of his readers to be alive or living. The whole book says why.

Thoreau moves up one level of abstraction from talking about the fact that “the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of Earths like ours” to “could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”. He is implying that the sun has a wider purpose and story rather than just for him. At the end of the paragraph he elaborates that it would be more beneficial to society to see through the eyes of others and consider the fact that you’re a small part of a big picture.

In this paragraph, I noticed a repetition of the theme of accountability as stated by both Macintyre and Thoreau. This passage demonstrates the idea of being accountable for others as well as being accountable for ones self. In this case, Thoreau raises the idea that laborers and the common man sometimes do not live their life to the fullest potential because they are preoccupied with their work. As a result, they are not experiencing life as they should and not taking accountability of their narrative. Thoreau makes a similar accusation to higher class individuals, in that they judge the common man to harshly and they should assist the common man in finding the finer fruits of life. This accusation fits into the idea that we are accountable for the narrative of others as well as our own.

I wonder if Thoreau is being shortsighted here because it is unlikely that people could survive famine and droughts if we only grew what we could by hand

The first version of Walden, the 1846-47 manuscript held by the Huntington Library (HM 924), begins, “I should not presume to talk so much about myself and my affairs as I shall in this lecture if very particular and personal inquiries had not been made concerning my mode of life,–what some would call impertinent, but they are by no means impertinent to me, but on the contrary very natural and pertinent, consider the circumstances” (1-2). Having already spent a year at the Pond, Thoreau began work on the first draft of Walden, initially conceived as a lyceum lecture for Concord citizens who were curious about his experimental mode of living. For more on Thoreau’s “A History of Myself” lecture, see Richard Smith, “Thoreau’s First Year at
Walden in Fact & Fiction” at the Thoreau E-server website, http://thoreau.eserver.org/smith.html.

[ see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.]

On the values of what both ‘being given’ and ‘having earned’ mean. He is comparing inheritance to having to earn things in your life, implying what is earned can be far more than what is given by alluding to Romulus and Remus – Having inherited nothing, they were able to create one of the the greatest empires in history

This comment was only posted as a trial run. I was not serious about this comment.

I love Thoreau’s use of paradox, forever reminding us that “every stick has two ends” or never to get all that comfortable with a static thought. Look at how he presents the capacity to “look through each other’s eyes for an instant” as a greater miracle, when in paragraph #10 he tells us that the “old have no very important advice to give the young” and again, further ahead in paragraph #14 he hears “an irresistible voice which invites” him away from whatever the wisest have to say to him. I believe Thoreau is a master at inviting us to do our own thinking and to stay forever on our toes when reading intentionally.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. 

This sentence, as an educator, strikes me most forcefully as our current industrial model of education is in need of some quality attention.

[to have a northern one]

Despite the popular understanding that T fled the problems of modem civilization, he was one of the earliest Americans to protest the northern factory system. He favored beginning one’s reforms at home, rather than in a distant land.

[only his peck of dirt]

“We must eat a peck of dirt before we die” is a proverb that can be traced at least as far back as Oswald Dyke’s English Proverbs of 1709.

[called]

Called: T, by the use of this word, stresses how frequently we are misled by the names of things (Cavell, 65).

[contracting yourselves into a nutshell]

“I could be bounded in a nutshell” (Hamlet, II, ii, 260).

[always on the limits]

On the limits: to the point of overdrawing a bank account.

[a simple and sincere account]

There are those who question just how “simple and sincere” T’s own account is—and not without reason.

[the notice of my readers]

For a particularly thoughtful study of the relationship between T and his intended audience, see Railton.

[we should cut our nails]

“The nails neither to exceed nor come short of the finger tips” (Hippocrates, “In the Surgery,” Works [Loeb, 1928, III, 63]).