Walden In The City

Today, I thought I'd justify the tagline for once. So, for the same reason we don't sit atop Greek ruins to read the classics, or stand in queues in a nest of bags to read chick lit, I've been reading Walden in the inner city. After all, without the contrast, where would be the journey?

Sometimes, Thoreau is like a poet; sometimes a naturalist, or a philosopher, or a libertarian; and sometimes he is Holden Caulfield. His early declaration that 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', though beautifully expressed, seems to fall into that final category. Isn't it just the voice of a young man justifying his superiority over 'phonys'? In a previous post, I even attempted to find a word to describe this shade of purple, and all I can suggest is that this is an example of prose being well-observedose instead of well-observed. There must be something impregnated in the cover of the book that does this to the book-end pages. The end-piece of this work, the lectures of a man in a hut on the evils of big government, merely serves to illustrate the spraining effect of isolation on sanity. It is not so much observed as declared.

But... the main body of the book is a calmer and mercifully less considered affair, and the insecurity of the slighlty older man introducing his experiences gives way quite unconsciously to the finer observation of a naturalist in the moment. When he talks of men always coming home from the nearest field, with their shadows having travelled further than their steps, there is humanity of a kind you might struggle to find in Oscar Wilde's otherwise similarly broad-brush epigrams. For the most part, it's a pleasure to read. Thinking as an ecologist by training, I wonder quite how Walden Pond was created and survived in woodland without eutrophication destroying its clarity. Equally, I wonder how this kind of writing survives in modern forms. I have no doubt that it does, in little pockets that have not yet been trammelled by the wheels of mass publishing. Thoreau does like that word, 'mass'.

I wonder whether Walden, which seems in its quieter moods to be more relevant than ever, could quite be published now. In my opinion it isn't for the most part an intellectual work, least of all successfully so; but largely it talks to the human being and not their economic fingerprint. Other times it is political, partial, frequently wildly unconvincing, and in all honesty, it probably doesn't have a lot to say to the average modern reader (if, as we are told, she is an aspirational woman juggling concerns of career and family). It does not address the concerns of key publishing demographics very well at all, and perhaps is all the more worthwhile for it.

Though I like the thought of his editor asking whether there might be more shopping in it.