Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

It is not necessary to remind you that Walt Whitman addressed himselfto everyone who could read or be read to. Listen to Thoreau in Walden(and note the forensic tone; there is no surer sign of it than these redundantnumerations):Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as two orthree, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million counthalf a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In themidst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds andstorms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowedfor, if he would not founder and go to the bottom, and not make port,by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator who succeeds.Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals …Thoreau is addressing so vast a throng that in his effort to be heard he haslost control of subjects and verbs, scrupulous writer though he usually is.Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourselfmuch to get new things whether clothes or friends. … Thingsdo not change; we change.All this is for the farmhand, the blacksmith, and the cook as well asfor the Governor’s lady. It is for Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as for Thoreau’smother, the boardinghouse keeper.New Englanders have been proverbially inarticulate; but they couldunlock their hearts and throats if they felt the audience to be sufficientlylarge. Did not Emily Dickinson say of her poetry:This is my letter to the worldThat never wrote to me?Her grand style—sunbursts of Handelian rhetoric—invokes a universe:Mine by the right of the white election!Mine by the royal seal!One dignity delays for all.Struck was I, yet not by lightning.204