Get Thee to Walden, Writes NYR Daily

R.H. Lossin looks to Henry David Thoreau's Walden for insight into our current isolation, in a new post at New York Review Daily. "When it became clear, back in March, that our habitual patterns of production and consumption would be severely constrained and that those of us with the means to do so would be spending a lot of time in our homes," writes Lossin, "many people started casting about for texts that might explain, or at least describe in even approximate terms, the physical, psychological, and political terrain of a quarantine." More: 

Among the myriad references to apocalypse movies and plague novels, Walden, too, began to appear in editorials and social media posts as a way to brighten the long stretch of isolation that lay ahead of us. These invocations were generally insipid, but Walden might not be as irrelevant as these self-help style citations made it seem. It certainly isn’t as sunny. Given that “Walden” is popularly reduced to the biographical conditions of its writing, it might also be noted that Thoreau may still have been in mourning when he embarked on his woodland adventure. His brother John had died, suddenly, of tetanus in 1842.

Thoreau understood that he was not so geographically remote. He received visitors (there is a chapter called “Visitors”) and took trips to the nearby village (there is also a chapter called “The Village”). He was, of course, interested in living off of the land and having a regular and intimate relationship with Nature. But he was equally interested in what he was leaving behind: the “fool’s life” of perpetual debt, in which men have “no time to be anything but a machine.” This other existence—this place where “a stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements”—is an indispensable, if negative, narrative and philosophical presence in the woods. Walden is not a summary rejection of quotidian reality: reminders of human society and industry do not violently intrude upon the landscape but comfortably inhabit the margins of his vision: “I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other.”

Continue at NYR Daily.