Henry David Thoreau wished to live deliberately, so on July 4, 1845, he walked into the woods by Walden Pond and lived a simple life for two years. Industrial society had gotten too much. Rapid developments in technology and the sciences along with a burgeoning awareness that something was not quite right – perhaps spiritually – prompted the unique-looking man to step away from it all. Thoreau had had enough. It was time to withdraw and regroup. Rediscover what is important. Take a breath and think. By still water, no less. Not a stream. Not a river. A pond in the Massachusetts forest.
Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, which meant that, like his friend and contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he believed in the agency of the individual – that every man, every woman, every child had immeasurable worth, but this worth was in opposition to the ruthless machinations of a faceless society that was only concerned with wealth and power. A person was much more than a cog in a machine that benefited the few. A person had a spirit, a good spirit, which led him to pen the words, “all good things are wild and free.” It is difficult not to see the Americanness of this assertion. Wildness. Freedom. Thoreau was the mind of a nation that had seemed to forget itself. While hordes of people dutifully marched into the factories, clocked in, worked long hours, and then clocked out only to do it again the next day and again and again, a thinker with untamed hair entered the forest and by doing so reacquainted America with our wilderness roots only to emerge with insights like a thunderclap to arouse anybody who would listen from their dreadful slumber. He writes in his essay entitled “Civil Disobedience” that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
We might be tempted to thank Thoreau for his contribution to the formation of the American conscience, but that affable nod might be premature.
Recently, I was having a discussion with my students about escapism. A person cannot turn this way or that without seeing somebody, head down, absorbed by their devices. I suggested that it was another form of escapism. During the Great Depression, folks fled into the movie theatres to get even an hour’s worth of escapism from a poor, dirty, and desperate world. They did the same during the Cold War when the atomic bomb imposed an existential threat. As the years stacked up to where we are today, it can easily be pointed out that our screen time has increased. One hour a week in the 1930s – umpteen hours a day in the current year. The reason, I argue, is the same. Escapism. The world is too much.
I turned it back around to my students. Why is the world too much? Their answers were at the ready. Wars. Climate change. Rising rates of depression. School shootings. No hope. No ray of light.
Quiet desperation. It had not gone away; it had only become worse.
You, dear listeners, have probably already heard of the following schema to understand history: soft times create weak men; weak men create hard times; hard times create strong men; strong men create soft times.
When society reaches a certain level of affluence – when everybody carries on their person a little computer that gives them access to untold amounts of information, allows them to keep in touch with others around the world, shop, affirm, discover, snoop, search, like, connect, learn, and, yes, order Chipotle, then we can safely assume that our world today is soft and that our members are weak. Are hard times to follow? Nobody can know. But is it in us to rediscover the fact that we were fearfully and wonderfully made? Thoreau took a two-year walk in the woods and said that we could. Perhaps our walk awaits. We do not want to be desperate anymore.
