Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

210 P. Standish
Rice $1.73 1 / 2
Molasses $1.73 Cheapest form of the saccharine.
Rye meal $1.03 3 / 4
Indian meal $0.99 3 / 4 Ceaper than rye.
Pork $0.2
[etc.]
(Thoreau, 1992b, p. 40).
There is no reason to doubt this as an accurate record of Thoreau’s income and
expenditure or that it provides a snapshot of sorts of the way he was spending his life
at the time, and certainly the frugality of his expenditure, in contrast presumably to
the operations of the banks, is part of his point. One can readily imagine that some
readers will then take this at face value—as the somewhat quaint detailing of a life
back in the woods, a retreat from the pressures of society. But there is a pointed lack
of frugality in the writing of this chapter, some four or five times longer than any
of the other 17 chapters that make up Walden, and this surely underscores the fact
that the period of time that Thoreau spent living at Walden Pond—something under
2 years—and his writing of this account of his life are his ‘experiment in living’,
which is to say his attempt to find a different economy for our lives. There is every
reason then for this chapter to exceed the measure of all the others.
Thoreau’s project is no less than to reappraise what Heidegger a century later
will call our ‘building dwelling thinking’ (Heidegger, 1971), and this extends to a
consideration of our relations to our neighbours, near and far: it questions how we
account for ourselves. The recurrence throughout the text of a vocabulary of counting
and accounting (of ‘capital’, ‘interest’, ‘profit’, ‘loss’, ‘return’), supported by a
consideration of what amounts to expenditure and investment and of what interest
there might be in this, helps to show the way that this is simultaneously a meditation
on language’s relation to things. Walden asks, in effect, the Biblical question
of what it shall profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul, a question that
Thoreau’s contemporary readers in New England could hardly have missed. But
it asks this without conventional religious presumptions but rather in relation to a
right economy of living. And this, as we saw, is wrongly understood if it is imagined
to imply merely an escape from society. Thoreau builds his hut about a mile
from his neighbours and presents himself as a kind of example to them. But there
comes a time when it is important to leave. He leaves the woods, as he explains
at the end of the book, for the same reason he went there: there is a time to move
on and to find something new. For, as Emerson has said, finding is founding. We
can but sojourn in our lives; there is no ultimate or original dwelling place. And in
contrast to this, Heidegger can appear positively nostalgic—nostalgia being, after
all, a homesickness. Heidegger is drawn back to the origins, Greek thought, of the
German language and, disastrously, of blood and belonging. Thoreau is without
Heideggerian nostalgia. Hence, Walden can make vivid something like the qualities
that a Greek physis and logos might suggest—though with an acknowledgement of