Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and the Highest of Arts
"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day– that is the highest of the arts.” --Thoreau,
Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," HB6 1882.
One of the reasons I have come to question the value of the traditional literature class is that such classes do little to help us understand what literature can do for us besides allowing a platform for showing off how smart we think ourselves to be. A class in reading should teach us more. Learning to read literature and use it has little to do with grades or school. If literature has nothing to teach us that we can use to make our lives better, make us happier, or make the lives of others better, by definition it is useless; and, it deserves to be relegated to the trash.
Hence, we read for a number of reasons, but the main ones are the same reasons we go to the gym, namely, to create selves who are better able to live long, happy, constructive lives, and--if we are really lucky--we learn to enjoy the exercise and play we use to construct such a self. We read to exercise our minds and hearts. We read so as to understand ourselves, our world, and others better than we already do. Sometimes this means reading texts and authors which are difficult to understand and who stretch and make sore the emotional and intellectual mussels we use to read and interpret.
No one promised that the one idea which will make life meaningful and worth living will be easy to grasp, nor is life fair enough to present such ideas just when we are ready to hear them; so, we read and practice reading and interpreting so as to be ready with the well-developed interpretative skills we need to recognize the good, usable ideas which are illusive, hard to grasp, and which stretch our thinking to degrees we never thought ourselves capable. As you found last week, learning to get the most out of authors, like Emerson, can be an exercise in building one's interpretative mussel; such hard reading often pays off in the ideas which suddenly make our lives make more sense and allow us to construct lives which are happier and richer than they would be without having struggled through the likes of Emerson, but Emerson is a philosopher king--the Man Thinking.
The person who we will read this week, Henry David Thoreau, is more down to earth and practical than his mentor and friend, Emerson. He is also very different from another Romantic, Poe, who we read list week. Romanticism is about feeling deeply and learning to "think" about, notice, and experience the world through intense feelings. Poe sought such sublime feelings in loss, despair, madness, fear, mystery and horror. Thoreau sought his sublime in nature and the everyday. Thoreau wants to get us thinking, but he wants us to be thinking about how we live our everyday lives and the sulblime moments which we overlook because we are too busy focusing on "more important stuff." Equally important, Thoreau wants us to think about how we can construct our lives so we can develop that sublime self we want to be in our heart of hearts. In other words, while Emerson will call for thinkers who were men of Action. Thoreau answers this call. Thoreau wants his readers out living--really living; hence, he writes essays about "Walking"--which we will read later--or "Where I Lived and What I Lived For." Thoreau's major theme is focused on what it means to live, and he's tried to write a "how to" manual on one approach to which got him in touch with meaning in his own life.
Thoreau was one of those rare individuals who knew how to live a good, moral, down to earth life. In every measure which matters, he was a good man. In fact, his life and thinking has inspired other good men, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Kennedy, to live better lives; yet, people tend to think of him as some sort of back to nature nut. These folks aren't ready to hear what Thoreau has to say.
Thoreau wants us to be awake to the possibilities life has to offer. That's it.
Walden;
or, Life in the Woods, the book from which you'll read this week, was about two years Thoreau spent in an experiment in which he tried to figure out the absolute minimum one needed to live a life where one was awake to all life has to offer AND capable of enjoying everything life has to offer He goes to the woods, as he says in the paragraph following the one quoted above, to figure out how to "live life deliberately." However, he also goes to the woods because he cares about his readers, and he wants us to live a life as rich as that he experienced while living on Walden pond.
Thoreau decides of living close to nature because he wants to strip away everything which isn't necessary to living a full life, and then build back in only those things which add to a better, even more full life. He also wanted to strip away the things which can get in the way of living a good, happy, spiritually full life, and he firmly believes that getting in touch with your real self is sometimes easier with some solitude, privacy, and time to think. By the way, the reason he leaves Walden pond is that he recognized that the fullest life possible wasn't limited to a cabin in the woods, and he has other things he wanted to explore.
Thoreau doesn't, as many will tell you, want you to head off and live in a cabin in the woods. He's led that life, and he wrote about it so you don't have to go live in the woods. That is, unless this is the life *you* decide you need to live fully and to get from life all it has to offer. Like Emerson, Thoreau thinks that living the good life begins with developing a sense of who you are and who you want to be and then being awake enough to the world and life's possibilities to take advantage of the opportunities and obstacles life offers. (This is why Thoreau spends so much time talking about the wonders of the morning and being fully awake.)
You get to the point of knowing yourself and what you want through visiting with others, working, reading, spending time in nature, thinking and, because one isn't complete without helping others, sharing what you have learned and know to help others make their life better.
One of the rather cool things about Thoreau is he isn't a snob. He doesn't just talk about living; he lives. He is Man Acting. He knows and lives the fact that you can construct such a full life being a farmer, pencil maker, handyman, writer, or anything else, but you have to start with spending the time to figure out what you want and then making sure life itself doesn't get in the way. As the quote above says, this is, according to Thoreau, "the highest of arts."
Over the past two weeks, you've thought about what it means to be an American, and you've begun to learn about Romantism, the Romantic search for the Sublime, and Romantic ideas about how to live a better life through learning to feel and feel for others. This is, as one of your classmates said, deep stuff. This week, you'll bring this deep thinking home, and you'll write about a more pragmatic, practical question, namely, how do you live your life so as to construct the life and self you want to be/become?
For Romantic, American Transcendentalist, like Thoreau and Emerson, changing society begins with creating people who are willing and able to work toward changing them selves into their best, most sublime selves. Being one's true, best self and creating a life where one can be this self and continue to develop one's self is the greatest challenge facing you as an individual, but the payoff to both yourself and to society is phenomenal. This is the great American challenge and dream, and it is the only pursuit through which American culture can develop its own potential.
Transcendentalist were, like most Americans of their time, optimists. They tended to think of others as essentially good. One key to learning to understand others is to realize that few get up in the morning and think, "Today is a good day for me to do evil." Usually, evil happens because people don't understand the consequences of their actions and the limitations of their understanding of the world. Few people, given a choice between acting selfishly and acting in a manner which will help both their selves and their neighbors, will choose to act selfishly. The trick then, at least according to the Transcendentalist, is figure out for one's self and then to help teach others how we transcend our own ignorance, how we are connected to others and through Nature, and to show--through our own life--how easy and good it is to live well.
Think of this week's reading, that is, Thoreau's "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" as a chance to think and write about where you live, where you want to live, what you live for, and how you plan to construct a life worth living.
You'll find your homework in "the highest of arts" in the discussion thread for the week, which asks you to explore your own relationship to stuff and constructing the good life. You'll have a chance to get to know your committee mates better, and you'll write a blog post what living a full life means to you. As you write and respond to others, make sure to attempt to incorporate the reading you have been doing into your thinking and writing; this is one measure I use to make sure you are doing the reading.
Please note the extra-credit day trip tied to Thoreau on the Extra-Credit tab.
As always, the assignments for the week are spelled out in the week's link off the "Assignments" page, and you should continue to pay attention to the website's home page--the Town Crier--for class announcements and hints on doing well in the course.
As always, write with questions.
Steve
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