THE American Classic

It's hard for me to believe how old Thoreau's Walden actually is. The book was published in 1854, recalling experiences of ten years earlier, in 1844, when Thoreau spent over a year living in a self-built cabin on the shores of Walden Pond (actually a lake) near Concord, Massachusetts.

This book is a recording of the deepest American experience with solitude. If sophisticated Americans find a bit of a retreat now and then normal, it was unheard of in Thoreau's day and his neighbors, as he records with glee, were somewhat disturbed. We are not. We find Thoreau's experiment with aloneness in the woods striking the deepest chords of our being.

When billionaires discuss their lifestyles as somehow motivated by Zen, it is refreshing to see what a life motivated by principles and philosophy is really like. It has little to do with aggrandizement of the "self," as we now understand it. Thoreau was not an isolated individual. Even in his stay at Walden Pond he had plenty of company. He was not selfish: he was generous with what he had the most of: his time. He also had real disdain for wealth, which is what the book is all about.

I've seen this book describe as a "self-help" book, and indeed it is. But it has nothing to do with self-help in the modern sense, which is either a near-solipsistic self absorbtion or a search for money. Thoreau's concept of himself was social: he engaged in political activity. (He was the father of nonviolence as it was practiced by the civil rights movement: the line of descent is Thoreau to Tolstoi to Gandhi to Martin Luther King.) His attitude towards the materialist life was summed up by his famous phrase: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation."

In short, if you're interested in an alternative mindset to money grubbing and narcissism; if you want to explore spiritual values as expressed by an American for a change, take a visit to Walden.

The essay usually published with it "On Civil Disobedience," is Thoreau's statement of the ethics of nonviolence and is one of the great political statements of all time.



An excellent site to begin the study of Thoreau and his works is:

http://www.eserver.org/thoreau/thoreau.html