I was a Henry David Thoreau fan through high school and most of college. I think it was a law that you had to read "Walden; or, Life in the Woods" at some point...at least if you wanted a date in the 1970's. On toward graduation though I started to accumulate doubts. By the time we had a couple kids and I was working, I decided Henry David was little unrealistic, to say the least.
Many things are appealing about Thoreau. Probably the most popular is his admonishment to "Simplify! Simplify!" What's usually missed by people reading that phrase is that Henry was free to come to that conclusion because someone had provided property, tools and food so that he could spend his days "simplifying." In order to achieve an ideal of simplicity, he leveraged someone else's complications. That's OK, because that's what we tend to do when there's more than one of us gathered together in one place. It's just that the realities of life make the imperative "simplify" a little more complicated and messy than is the case when someone has the spare time to sit on a rock and proclaim it.
Another Thoreau-ism that gets tossed about is "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I spent a lot of years believing that or something close to it. I eventually abandoned it for a carefully reasoned alternative: No they don't. Most people have a fairly standard compliment of pluses and minuses, ups and downs, good and bad. All lives contain their own values, lessons and drama even if the people living them happen to miss it.
I think not just "most," but all of us represent the broadest imaginable spectrum ranging from contentedness to something on the unfortunate side of quiet desperation. To group us into "most" or other bucket, or to exclude us from same, creates categories in our minds that don't really contribute to our understanding of the next person we run into...which I guess isn't a problem if you live by yourself in the woods. It might be a problem though if you try to use that knowledge in a relationship.
To bring myself clarity on this subject, I long ago imagined my wife scrubbing the bathroom sink. In I walk with Walden in my hand. I tap her thoughtfully on the shoulder and say, "I think you live a life of quiet desperation." Now while it is entirely possible that the next few moments of this conversation might bump up against desperate, I doubt that quiet would be anywhere to be found. Here's what I'd say if I wanted to be helpful in the situation: "Let me do that." Henry is not too often helpful with real people. He just sounds nice sometimes when we're by ourselves.
There's a phrase from Socrates (via Plato) that is parallel in meaning when quoted out of context, as it usually is. It says, "...the unexamined life is not worth living." It's easy to see how this dove tails with Henry's pronouncement about quiet desperation. Of course, what Socrates actually said was much more like: "What shall we say then, that the unexamined life is not worth living? Absolutely not!" That's a little different when taken in context. It's an interesting contrast I think because Socrates was very full of himself on many levels. Still, he never seemed to elevate himself above being a common man. He never separated himself from the great unenlightened masses.
I do think Henry unintentionally supplies a good starting place for identifying a good many problems we're surrounded with today. He says at one point words to the effect that "If I had enough will I could sit on a rock and will myself to live forever." That might be the Mt. Everest of narcissism; the air's thin up there of course and apparently so is logic and the powers of observation.
In any case, I think what Henry David passes off as quiet desperation is really pretty exciting stuff. If you give your heart to someone, have children together, grow old together and eventually encounter the challenges common to the winding down of life; if you are born into strife and live in suffering, if your life is torn by betrayal, if you are born with an entire silver place setting in your mouth, or even if you accept the challenges of facing life alone with only you and God to understand your heart, do you not have the essential foundation of a life that is a redeemed triumph over all circumstance and against all odds? And the grace of it is that most of us wind up with the realization of this singular reality without ever having gone looking for it. Circumstance eventually hunts us all down. We crumble in the face of a cruel prop. And then we realize that our broken need was the only thing that could reveal to us what we left in the garden and how to get it back with more than we ever could imagine.
In a half century of living, I've learned that life eventually finds all of us. Thank God.
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