Thoreau's mistake

A new take-down of the "hypocrite" Thoreau scores some strong points, through several selectively and unsympathetically cherry-picked criticisms. I stand by my admiration of the dawn riser who walks confidently through the world, but must confess agreement that Henry did not adequately acknowledge the value of living as well in society as in nature.

Perhaps the strangest, saddest thing about “Walden” is that it is a book about how to live that says next to nothing about how to live with other people. Socrates, too, examined his life—in the middle of the agora. Montaigne obsessed over himself down to the corns on his toes, but he did so with camaraderie and mirth. Whitman, Thoreau’s contemporary and fellow-transcendentalist, joined him in singing a song of himself, striving to be untamed, encouraging us to resist much and obey little. But he was generous (“Give alms to everyone that asks”), empathetic (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and comfortable with multitudes, his and otherwise. He would have responded to a shipwreck as he did to the Civil War, tending the wounded and sitting with the grieving and the dying.

Poor Thoreau. He, too, was the victim of a kind of shipwreck—for reasons of his own psychology, a castaway from the rest of humanity. Ultimately, it is impossible not to feel sorry for the author of “Walden,” who dedicated himself to establishing the bare necessities of life without ever realizing that the necessary is a low, dull bar; whose account of how to live reads less like an existential reckoning than like a poor man’s budget, with its calculations of how much to eat and sleep crowding out questions of why we are here and how we should treat one another; who lived alongside a pond, chronicled a trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and wrote about Cape Cod, all without recognizing that it is on watering holes and rivers and coastlines that human societies are built.

Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us. Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

But,

	Boston Review (@BostonReview)
10/14/15, 3:59 PM Henry David Thoreau was not an enemy of civic life (contrary to Kathryn Schulz's recent @NewYorker piece):hubs.ly/H01hnG-0

New Republic (@NewRepublic)

10/24/15, 5:00 PM

Henry David Thoreau's radical optimism: on.tnr.com/1NsN1ir pic.twitter.com/uBnk2YaWhF

	New Republic (@NewRepublic)
10/26/15, 8:30 PM It's time for everyone to stop hating on Henry David Thoreau. bit.ly/207zO5J pic.twitter.com/yBPe31ZmY5

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