I went to the woods because it was a sunny, beautiful day and I was hoping to see colorful fall leaves. My partner and I visited Walden Pond for an afternoon, and decided to listen to the audiobook of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, as we were driving there and walking around the pond.
Thoreau spent two years living in a cabin he built on Walden Pond, in 1845-47, on land he was granted use of for free by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another writer. He wrote a book, Walden, about his experience and also his essaying opinions about people in general.
On our way to the pond, I laughed at how Thoreau really digs into farmers,
“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. ...Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”
The ironic part is that he becomes a bean farmer himself later in the story, claiming to be both a more and less successful farmer than all of the other farmers. Clearly he does not think he's digging his own grave as he hoes the bean plants, but perhaps he thinks he's more worthy as he does this by choice and not by inheritance.
Thoreau published Walden in 1854, but sounded remarkably modern-day in some of his complaints against people's lifestyle. Apparently we were already importing food and working ourselves to disability in the mid-1800s.
"The mean and sneaking lives we lead are concerned with…an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his
groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day."
I also found Thoreau's words on our clothes matching us after a transformation resonated. Choosing new clothes as part of a social transition can be nerve-wracking. I have experienced a lot of other transformation in the way I think about things or in the way I understand myself, that the clothes are only the outward expression of.
“Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.”
I like how this quote expresses how we can change until our clothes no longer fit us anymore, not just physically, but in who we are.
As we headed back to the car, listening, we reached the famous quote -
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
He continues with very much a journalist or memoir sentiment, to learn about life and write about one's own experience:
"If [life] proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Thoreau also shares how creating art can shape our moral worldview.
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. ... to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts."
Thoreau, while complaining about the new railroads and the fast speed of modern life, manages to share a premonition about e-bikes in the bike lane... :)
"Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt..."
I had a lot of fun listening to Walden while walking around on the beach and in the woods where Thoreau lived.
I read Walden when I was in high school, but this time, I realized how much of this book is about the lives of people who do not live in a cabin in the woods.
Thoreau's writer's retreat is the contrast or foil. It matters less that he shared meals with friends and got the land for free, because his goal, as I interpret it, was to create a work of art demonstrating what we can learn from wilderness to inspire more intentional lives in society.
We don't talk about this enough: Trans men can have period pain
I just listened to this excellent episode of CRAMPED by Kate Helen Downey, featuring Max Gross, comedian, who shares his experience of having endometriosis and just generally getting medical treatment as a trans person.
Kate uses inclusive language such as "people with uteruses" and her caring enthusiasm for spreading awareness on this topic really shines through. Definitely worth a listen!
Kate Helen Downey
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What have you gained from going outside? Let us know in the comments!
