From the Outside, Looking In

In today’s world, it seems that we are constantly having news shoved down our throats, whether keeping up with the lives of celebrities or attempting to stay aware of the breaking news every minute of our day. As technology progress, receiving our news is becoming much easier, and ultimately integrating with our daily activities. Surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau shared a similar sentiment with current individuals back in his days at Walden Pond. There were many factors that gave Thoreau motivation to exclude himself from his community, a significant one being the much slower pace of life that Walden Pond offered him. Thoreau was no doubt a firm believer in individual thought, urging his readers to question traditional viewpoints and the current status quo.

While reading “Walden,” it may seem that Thoreau is simply giving us a stream of consciousness by which he lists his many ideas about society. While he does tend to go in detail about a variety of topics, there is not the sense of disorder and “randomness” that is often attributed to literature that employs that literary technique. That notion can be easily refuted when we look at how Thoreau transitions between his thoughts. He often makes skillful “moves,” starting from what he observes as an outsider to shifting his focus on providing us with his own interpretation. You could say that he becomes highly metaphysical quite often in Walden. He does this by giving anecdotes about a similar experience or simply calling it as he sees it. Some may believe that this approach lends to many contradictions, but he is able to show that his ideas are worth listening to, by the way he draws his conclusions based on observations. The seeming contradictions that Thoreau makes can be viewed as changes in his opinions that he has held most of his life, but that changes once he becomes on the outside looking in.

In Chapter 2 of Walden, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” Thoreau shares with us how we should approach the vast quantity of information that we face every day. If he was around today, Thoreau would be talking about the stream of news that we receive from televisions and cell phones. In his day, this overwhelming amount of information still hit people daily, albeit through printed newspaper. Either way, the reality as Thoreau puts it remains that, “hardly a man takes a half hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, ‘What’s the news?” (18) Thoreau is describing the nature of news as information that has become a part of our subconscious thoughts (we always want to stay informed) but having the ability to make us not think for ourselves. He gives many examples of tragic events that could occur on a daily basis, such as a robbery or “one cow run over on the Western Railroad.” (19) Thoreau then makes the transition to his metaphysical thoughts by insinuating that we are content with just one story, knowing too much will make us either uncomfortable or uninterested.

What perhaps is most interesting about Walden, first published in 1854, is that the importance of reporting events has not changed much. While the events themselves have changed drastically, the way in which news is presented to us has not changed much. Many of us can sympathize with Thoreau when he is overwhelmed by how powerful of a role that media plays in our everyday lives. The term “fake news” has been floating around all outlets of news media in our current times, which according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary is defined as “a political story which is seen as damaging to an agency, entity, or person…by no means restricted to politics, and seems to have currency in terms of general news.” Thoreau didn’t use that adjective explicitly, but believed that, “men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.” (21) Although news comes to us at such a high frequency, it still requires us to filter out biases and discern fact from fiction. Once again, Thoreau very slyly makes his transition from just describing the way something is while concluding with a metaphysical insight. In almost every sentence that Thoreau wrote down on his paper, there is an effortless flow from what is to what it is to Thoreau. It could appear that his mind is all over the place, but Thoreau becomes metaphysical in his approach to explain himself. By presenting the reader with a circumstance followed by his thoughts, he allows us to take the information and draw our own conclusions. Unlike the information that bombards us on a regular basis, Thoreau’s writing is a breath of fresh air in allowing us to experience his perspective from Walden Pond. Whether we embrace his unique philosophy or defend our traditions, it is an interesting prospect to see both sides. Who knows, perhaps one day we will follow in his footsteps and experience society from a pond outside our town.

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