Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Thoreau does not urge us to live in shacks merely to save money andtime; to eschew railroad trains, newspapers, and the postal service; to lay intwo sets of washable clothing and a bar of soap; to refuse these jobs whichdeform our souls between nine and five. These are not ends in themselves.“Simplify, simplify, simplify!” All these are injunctions in order that we mayrefine our ear to the promptings of our subjective, inward self. The evil ofcommunity is that it renders us stupid—and cowardly. Walden is a manual ofself-reliance so much more profound than Emerson’s famous essay that thelatter seems to be merely on the level of that advice to melancholics whichdirects them to take walks and drink a lot of milk.Thoreau did not merely meditate about the problem of living: hecostingly, searchingly exemplified it, and his work rings with the validityof that single-minded commitment. One of the rewards of independence,apparently, is that you are certain that you are the master of your choices,you are not left to doubt whether or not you are free.Yet there is no air of triumph about the latter end of Thoreau’s life.It is difficult to be an American. In some aspects of his life and thoughtThoreau is one of our most conspicuous, most outrageous Americans. Butthe spiritual situation in which these citizens of the New World find themselvesis so new, so demanding, and so uncharted, that only by keepingin contact with its total demands can one maintain one’s head above thesurface. A partial American will drown. Thoreau did not grasp the New-World sense of the innumerability of the human race—nor did Emerson,for all his employment of the word “universal.” Thoreau had a parochial, awood-lot view of nature and her mighty laws. Is there a Thoreau who cantell us that once one has grasped and accepted a basic solitude, all the othergifts come pouring back—love, friendship, and nature? One reads the lifestory of Thoreau with anxious suspense.And Abraham Lincoln?And Melville—and Poe?216