A WEEK ON THE CONCORD
1 Introduction
I love my fate to the very core and rind." So wrote Henry David Thoreau and nothing could be more characteristic of him.
Most men, it seems, are to some extent disappointed and disconnected. We complain of our luck, lament that we did what we did, or did not do what we did not. Things might have been better had we been born somewhere else or under some different circumstances. We missed our chance; did not get our desert. We are trapped in a life which we should not have chosen. Or, as Thoreau himself wrote on another occasion, "The mass of men lead lives of quite desperation." But he, who was unique in so many respects, was unique in this also. "I have heard no bad news," he said. He believed himself to be that very rare thing, a happy man, and he had no regrets.
So startling a phenomenon ought to attract great attention in an age like our own, especially when, as in Thoreau's case, this happy man gave an explicit account. Yet most of those who read that account, even most of those who read it with sympathy and admiration, do not follow his advice either because, they say, they cannot or because they conclude that only for that very special sort of person Thoreau happened to be would it work.
The lesson he had taught himself, and which he tried to teach others, was summed up in the one word "Simplify." That meant simplify the outward circumstances of your life, simplify your needs and ambitions; learn to delight in the simple pleasures which the world of Nature affords. It meant also, scorn public opinion, refuse to be moved by the judgement of others. And unlike most who advocate such attitudes, he put them into practice.
One result has been that one of his books is now almost universally regarded as among that six or eight undoubted
2 Introduction
masterpieces of American literature. But it was not so regarded during his own lifetime, and even those few villagers who knew him personally tended to think of him either as a mere eccentric or, at best, as one who had failed to fulfill his promise. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that those who have come after and have recognized him as a classic have shown little inclination to follow him.
If "Simplify" is the one word which sums up his teaching, it also sums up better that and other could what his own contemporaries were not doing and what we have, increasingly, tended not to do. They lived in an age of increasing complexity and great hope; we in an age of still greater complexity and growing despair. Yet few believe that our problems can be solved as he solved his-even though many of his jibes come home to us more forcibly that they did to those of his own day. Consider, for example, this comment on Progress defined in terms of increasing material and mechanical complexity:
"Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity if joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts 'All aboard!' when the smoke has blown away and the vapor condesed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run iver-and it will be called, and will be, 'a melancholy accident.'"
Yet though the critics of our society admit that many have indeed been run over, they are usually convinced that the cure for the evils of complexity is more complexity still, and the cry "all aboard" is now not at the railroad station but at the launching pad of a rocket for the moon.
It is not that Thoreau's writings have not been read and pondered. Some of them have been translated into nearly every major language of the world, including the Japanese. Nor has he failed to influence many of the most significant of subsequent teachers and reformers. Tolstoy, Gandhi and the early leaders of what was to become that British Labor Party, all acknowledge their debt of him. Even some of the communist have claimed him as on their side. But none of these admirers has been willing to take him whole. They usually concentrate upon his cristism of our social and economic system and refuse to accept his alternatives. They disregard his insistence on the primary importance of a life
