Gossip and the Seeds of Disobedience

Thoreau’s discussion of “The Village” goes a long ways toward explaining why he retired to the woods and to Walden Pond:

Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

It’s obvious Thoreau sees the newspaper as little more than “gossip,” and gossip seems to be as meaningless as the rustle of dry leaves. I’m not sure what these “medicinal” doses of gossip were intended to do, other than confirm his resolve to spend his time in the woods away from society.

Thoreau avoids the news because it produces “numbness and insensibility to pain:”

Some have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness and insensibility to pain — otherwise it would often be painful to bear — without affecting the consciousness.

Even if it doesn’t produce “numbness” it’s obvious that it does little good for the men as they “sit forever in public avenues without stirring.”

Thoreau even suggests light-heartedly that he was let out through the back door to escape to the woods after hearing the news:

I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieveful of news — what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer — I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.

The news is so bad that he needs to escape out the back door. Of course, when we later find out that he was locked up for not paying his taxes, perhaps he wasn’t entirely joking here.

For me, the most interesting line in this chapter, and perhaps in the whole book is:

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Caught up in the infinite possibilities of the world I think I entirely missed this line when I first read Walden as a college junior. Many years later, it seems to make perfect sense. It is precisely at those moments when I felt lost and “lost the world” that I truly found myself. The most dramatic of these moments was, of course, upon returning from the Vietnam War and realizing much to my dismay that my entire view of the world had changed. Everything I once believed was called into doubt, and I literally had to reinvent myself after returning, just as many other veterans must have done. After the war, though, I had a much better sense of who I was and what I believed. The same thing happened recently when I had my operation for throat cancer and was unable to eat or talk to anyone for two months. I lost more than just forty pounds in those two months. Two months of isolation, even in the room with the ones you love the most, can force you to reexamine what you believe.

Nor did I realize just how prophetic this paragraph was just two years before I was sent to Vietnam:

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler’s, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

Now, of course, it’s slavery that Thoreau is objecting to here, not our intervention in a foreign country to deny those people the right to rule themselves. Still, the idea is the same for those of us who went off to fight a war we neither understood nor supported. For a while at least, the “dirty institutions” of the American government constrained me to fight a war I did not believe in.

Thoreau’s final charge against society somehow seems equally ominous in light of recent trends in American society:

I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

Now I’m not going to live as simply as Thoreau did. Otherwise I would have to give up my web page, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? Still he raises a number of interesting questions about trends in America. How many people do we have locked up in American prisons? Why is there an increasing disparity between the wages of the upper and lower classes? Is there a connection between these two? Duh.

And we knew this in the 1850’s and still can’t find something to do about it?

It’s funny how a "dated, overly optimistic" writer can seem so relevant today, isn’t it?

Walden, Chapter Eight, “The Village”

It would be a very natural occurrence for a well adjusted man in the mid nineteenth century to walk into town to gather news and visit with friends, and that is exactly what Thoreau did.

Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

Typically, Thoreau viewed a group of people to be similar to any gathering of living things. He would feel comfortable with either group, learning from it.

…a colony of muskrats…a village of busy men…

Being human, he was drawn to his own kind, however, to keep current.

The village appeared to me a great news room…

Thoreau preferred that a certain amount of distillation occur before he listened to the village gossip. The original stories from the first speakers he thought rough and unedited.

These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more delicate hoppers within doors.

The evening visits with friends were his choice. Here he could gather news of the village and of his country all in one pleasant setting, perhaps over a cup of coffee or a digestif.

I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together much longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again.

Returning home after dark prompted Thoreau to comment on just how dark the woods could be and how easy it was for people to lose their way. But time spent lost in the woods is not necessarily time lost if you know what I mean. Thoreau decided there was a lesson to be learned off the path.

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

…and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,…for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,–do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

One afternoon spent in town, retrieving a shoe from the cobbler’s, resulted in Thoreau’s being arrested for not paying a poll tax. His omission was a protest against his government which allowed slavery to exist. Unless there was another time Thoreau was arrested, this is the jail stay that prompted his writing of his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience.”

One afternoon,…I was seized and put into jail, because, …I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house.

The chapter ends with a comment on the honesty of travelers who stopped by his cabin to rest when Thoreau was not there.

Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book…

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

‘The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.’

Cultivating a Relationship with Nature

If we learn anything in “The Bean Field” it is that Thoreau is a much better philosopher than a farmer. But at least he tackles the job of growing beans as enthusiastically as he tackles life itself:

What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden?

At least he, unlike most modern farmers, takes the pests philosophically for he concedes to his worst enemies, the woodchucks, their right to the land he is claiming for his crops. That’s the same philosophy I take in my own garden, where I grow twice as many blueberries and blackberries as I need so that I can share half of them with the robins that were here when I moved in. When I planted my crops I figured it was only fair that, since I was taking their land, that I planted extra for them, too. Unfortunately, commercial farmers don’t seem to take the same attitude.

Thoreau doesn’t seem too fond of manual labor, but again he is philosophical about it:

But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result

I’m not quite sure what the “classic result” is for Thoreau, but for me it’s usually a sore back. Hoeing is hard work that every person should have to endure at some point in his life to appreciate just how precious food really is.

Thoreau’s observation of the nighthawk’s flight reveals that he was a much better naturalist, and poet, than he was a farmer:

The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven’s eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.

Although he may not be much of a farmer, it turns out that Thoreau was a better farmer than he was salesman:

It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them — the last was the hardest of all — I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.

That should come as little surprise to anyone who has read the previous section on visitors. It’s doubtful that Thoreau would have the “gift of gab” that any true salesman must have. You have to want to talk to your customers to sell them something.

Half-jokingly, Thoreau suggests that it is easier to cultivate beans than it is to cultivate the human soul:

This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.

Though Thoreau obviously has several of these traits, his point is well taken. It’s certainly as hard to change oneself as it is to grow a crop.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog entry, the only time in my lifetime I did not have a garden was the two years I was in the army and the year after the army before I had bought my own home. Thus, I tend to agree with Thoreau when he says:

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely

Maintaining our family vegetable garden was a very different experience than the experience I had commercially picking walnuts in California or strawberries on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound. Despite the hard work, I was always proud to work in our family garden. My two experiences in working on commercial farms were diametrically opposed to this; both of these seemed like demeaning experiences, ones where I felt that I had been cheated by the farmers.

If Thoreau felt this way in 1850:

By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Can you imagine what he would feel like today? Today’s mega-farms would probably shock anyone from the 1850’s. Certainly they do not remind us of the Jeffersonian ideal that would have appealed to the transcendentalists and others concerned with the welfare of democracy.

To Thoreau, and hopefully to most home gardeners, gardening was simply another means to stay in touch with Nature:

Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the fields fill the farmer’s barns. The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

Luckily, unlike commercial farmers, our crops are a luxury, not a necessity. In a good year we have the pleasure of indulging in fresh tomatoes off the vine and corn taken from stalk to microwave in less than three minutes. We have an intimacy with nature that is never dreamt of by those who have never been closer to a farm than their nearest Safeway.

Welcome Englishmen, Welcome Englishmen

Although Thoreau begins the chapter entitled “Visitors:”

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither.

The irony in his boast makes it quite obvious he didn’t really go out of his way to invite friends to visit him during his stay at Walden Pond. Perhaps, it had something to do with the previous chapter entitled “Solitude:”

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

Apparently anything more than two was considered a crowd:

I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

It seems that friendship promotes “closeness,” while society is too impersonal to promote closeness.

Part of this avoidance of society seems to come from Thoreau’s belief that you need to maintain a certain distance if you’re going to discuss important ideas:

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

Although I’m not entirely clear what point he is making here, I can somewhat understand his need to maintain some kind of distance to contemplate “big thoughts.” That’s the kind of distance you get from a book, isn’t it? For many of us, conversation doesn’t allow us to process ideas thoroughly, though it may well raise important questions that need to be considered later.

It is almost as if the physical presence of another makes it difficult to appreciate that which is most intimate, our souls:

If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case.

The very physicality of one’s voice makes it difficult for Thoreau to appreciate their spiritual presence.

The very best place to share closeness is in the pinewood:

As the conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough. My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.

The woods have become his “chapel” where grand thoughts somehow seem more appropriate.

One of the best things about visitors in the woods is that only the most serious visitors came that far to see him:

As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me

And the people who did come to see him were some of the finest that he knew.

Interestingly enough, one of his favorite visitors is a rather unusual man:

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy.
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child

It would seem that this is the happiness that Thoreau himself is seeking in his own “quiet and solitary” way. One can only suspect that Thoreau himself had been unable to attain the same “mirth” “without alloy” that this innocent, uneducated had attained. The man is in many ways the “Noble Savage” that the French Romantics so admired.

To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

This simple man in many ways reminds me of Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” whose unshakeable love of others gave him a strength that his “wiser” neighbors could never attain.

Like Gimpel, Thoreau’s neighbor has all the simple virtues:

If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.

What the neighbor lacks, if you can find an undesirable trait to be “lacking,” is the kind of dark despair of more intelligent men when they find that their life has not gone as they wished. The modern angst of the Beats seems to come to mind here. You have to wonder how Thoreau would have felt about the despair that is so much a part of their trademark.

His description of visitors he did appreciate is far outweighed by his litany of undesirable visitors:

I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town’s poor, but who should be; who are among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests.

It’s quite clear that Thoreau did not have the temperament to be a minister or teacher, isn’t it? Often these are the very kinds of people that seem to be drawn to those who have “new” ideas. On a less positive note, this is the same kind of arrogance that Thoreau seemed to display in the earlier section on “Reading.” Sounds a little like some teachers who Jeff Ward described earlier, teachers who don’t want to be bothered teaching their “superior” ideas to men who aren’t worthy of them.

Not only was Thoreau bothered by those who came looking for ideas that would help them to give meaning to their life, he was equally bothered by those who came to push their own ideas:

Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.

Ah the very material of student essays. While these delightful similes and metaphors bring back old memories of amusement and frustration, they also reveal a man who seems somewhat intolerant of those who disagreed with him, or who simply couldn’t measure up to his own genius.

Thoreau was equally unimpressed by many of his professional visitors:

Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless committed men, whose time was taken up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out — how came Mrs. — to know that my sheets were not as clean as hers? — young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions — all these generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my position

Times don’t change too much, do they? Most pragmatic men would see such an enterprise as “impractical” or a “waste of time” because the spiritual aspect of their life is limited to Sunday mornings. Seen in the light of history, though, they seemed quite unaware of the importance of this historical spiritual journey that would influence generations to come.

Surprisingly enough, though, Thoreau seems even more put off by those who came forth to convert him to their ideas than by the traditionalists:

Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing,–
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I feared the men-harriers rather.

Despite his earlier protest that he loved society “as much as most,” Thoreau limits himself to a small group of similar spirits:

…all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake, and really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with –"Welcome, Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had communication with that race.

Echoing Samoset’s famous greeting to the Pilgrims on March 16, 1621, Thoreau makes it clear that the only visitors he really wants to see at Walden Pond are those seeking the same “freedom” from society that he is seeking.

It’s a Small World After All

The recent debate sparked by Megnut’s blog on the essence of blogging and the vehement replies on Jonathan’s site have made me rethink some earlier doubts that blogging could ever be the phenomena apparently advocated by the new prophets of bloggerdom.

Personally, I have always doubted that bloggers could ever adequately replace journalists, though they might, in mass, outweigh editorial writers. Unfortunately, too often blogging has actually seemed to slip to the level of “letters to the editor” where mere rants rule out any kind of rational argument.

As a literature major, neither do I think bloggers have much chance of surviving as storytellers. Though blogs are free, I’d prefer to read my stories from a book. I’d prefer to let editors and professional reviewers waste their time finding what is worth reading than sort through all of the blogs online myself to find the few worth devoting that kind of time to. I haven’t found many Hawthornes or Hemingways online so far despite many hours of reading.

So, why do I spend so much time on line reading blogs? What is the primary appeal of blogging?

It seems to me that the primary appeal is the “personal” ties you feel with other bloggers. By sharing our feelings about events with other bloggers, we establish ties that bind us together. The internet throws a web of personal relationships, often supplemented by emails, over those actively participating in creating a new web space.

When I recently had surgery for throat cancer, I received a number of emails from fellow bloggers wishing me the best. When’s the last time you received such encouragement from your local newspaper reporters?

To me, this “friendship” lies at the heart of whatever we can hope to accomplish as bloggers.

The real question is how we can build on this “friendship” to build a better place for all of us. One thing it could do is add perspective to the news, particularly since bloggers seem to come from many different parts of the world and from different professions. I often discuss news events with friends, and our discussions, whether we agree or not, help me to refine my own thoughts and define my own position. Blogging should simply be an extension of this kind of “friendly” discussion. When it’s an extended discussion by friends we trust from many places and from many different perspectives, this should be a powerful new way of dealing with events in our world.

The real potential of blogging, though, is to go beyond mere journalism. Blogging, as form of journaling, can help us to see our world directly through the eyes of another person. We can see the world through the eyes of an Arkansas writing teacher, a single mother and artist raising two daughters, an emergency nurse, an English poet, a retired librarian, an active one, too, and all those great people I link to from all over the world. What a magical view of a diverse world perceived from a thousand different viewpoints.

Such insights should really begin to give us a better idea of what it means to be human and, perhaps, for the first time, truly teach us that it is a small world, after all . What happens when you feel closer to a Candadian than you do to the man who lives next door to you?

And some people thought they wanted to be mere journalists.