It has been years since that day when my elementary school teacher announced one of the most important events of the semester: our introduction to the writing of Henry David Thoreau.  I remember her romantic rhapsodizing about the beauties of nature and the man who brought such insight and wisdom to man’s enjoyment of it.  To my teacher, Thoreau was an individualist who challenged all conventions and dared to live a life alone, unfettered by the demands of society.

Yes, it has been years.  I reopened Thoreau’s WALDEN a few days ago, and discovered an almost startling fact: I disagree. 

It is easy to a mind unaccustomed to rational evaluation to disregard everything important to life, and to run to the security of that vague concept known as nature.  What Thoreau has done in WALDEN is give the drop out of society a prestige and a sanction.  By dropping out today, a young man can say, “Thoreau is my example.”  Dropping out, he might think, takes courage and independence. 

One of Thoreau’s ideas is that the "system" or the systematized career requires the surrender of integrity.  He believes that those people concerned with the market place have betrayed their true nature.  But, in reality, the surrender of integrity is not a requirement of the market place itself; rather it comes about from the demands of people who have willingly surrendered their own integrity.  No system that leaves men a free choice demands the surrender of human virtues.  Only some men, who work within that system, acting irrationally, can demand such a sacrifice.  The market place is not coercion.

Thoreau fails to draw a clear line between the market place and the effect of tradition upon some men.  He seems to equate them out of hand.  Despite this major flaw, Thoreau is right about the ‘lives of quiet desperation’ many men live.

In the chapter entitled “Economics” he states that he aims not criticism at those who are ‘discontented’ with their lot in life, as well as those ‘who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it…’ He tries to show them how.  But Thoreau’s economics is not much.  In fact, man needs very little: food, shelter, clothing and fuel.  Perhaps he is over-glorifying the simple and forgetting the fact that trade and the market place are economic inventions designed to create leisure of which Thoreau apparently had a great deal.

Why was Thoreau so critical of an organized life?  He certainly didn’t hate organization.  Nature itself is highly organized.  Certainly he noticed that.  I suggest that WALDEN is an attack on man, or more precisely those men with whom he could not get along.  Thoreau mentions that he once acted in a self-appointed civil capacity for the community in which he lived.  He says that during the whole time of his service, he was never paid, neither did he ask for such pay.  But he seems to resent their not offering to pay him.  This may reveal a certain failure in Thoreau’s character, an inability to settle his accounts, possibly an inability to communicate.  Could it be that Thoreau’s strong individualism was merely a mask covering his own ‘quiet desperation?’

 Posted on 5/29/04